End-User Computing Everywhere All At Once
EUC, or end-user computing, has been around for decades but is currently a hot topic amongst heavily audited and regulated institutions like financial services and insurers. However, it’s an area that has been plagued by risk and challenges since the rise of IT. But what is it? Why is it a challenge to companies? How can companies mitigate enterprise risks around the increased usage and reliance of such applications and, indeed, what is out there to help resolve such issues?
What is EUC?
EUC refers to any application or solution created or installed on users' local machines or desktops. These tools are typically installed by local IT departments at the end-user's request or as part of an approved suite of standard desktop applications given to all employees. For example, applications like Excel can be used by end users for modeling, computations, and testing scenarios.
These tools often improve an individual’s efficiency; they can be supported by users with no technical knowledge or just basic low-code knowledge, without the resource limitations imposed by official development resources or procurement processes. However, they come with their own challenges. For power users of spreadsheets within financial institutions, this could involve high-frequency data decisions, complex analysis, or scenario testing - areas that have increasingly been ungoverned, unmanaged, and often lack official auditing.
Why is EUC such a challenge?
The low/no-code movement has sparked a boom in the world of citizen development, enabling people who may not have traditionally been able to create applications to build simple apps or create a series of complex instructions using basic “low” code. This is actively transforming the way they work.
Now, anyone in an organization can access tools to build their own applications or implement off-the-shelf solutions, streamlining their work without requesting help from overstretched IT departments and often at a price point that will circumvent the procurement process. Even with traditional tools such as Excel and Access, end users can create their own solutions to problems.
Such desktop platforms and solutions, while effective, are exposed to ungoverned decision-making in terms of the IP built, created, and deployed. The lack of data auditability, governance, and transparency may create costly long-term security risks. By cutting corners, and not going through official channels and using approved design methods, these applications can lack security, auditing, and proper testing to ensure they work as intended. Additionally, problems of lag and human errors made due to the pressure of deadlines, reporting demands, or time-to-market further compound the EUC pain.
Why is Excel so involved in EUC?
Microsoft Excel is perhaps the most versatile data modeling tool ever created. Since its introduction in 1985, it has been a staple of almost every company on the planet.
Excel’s low barrier to entry leads smoothly into the ability to create higher complexity models, allowing users to do anything from budgeting monthly expenses to creating sophisticated underwriting models, back-testing data scenarios, complex valuations, and regulatory reporting analysis.
This accessibility, however, means that every user has access to a tool that allows them to build mini applications or programs within a program - with no built-in version control, auditing, or robust testing options to ensure data output integrity. These files are often unencrypted and shared across groups in an open-ended manner, hence no version control management and leaving security and data integrity at risk.
How can we resolve EUC issues?
Many EUC issues require systematic process monitoring, control, and governance. Organizations must provide clear guidance on how users adopt and use desktop EUCs, how they create the logic around their process of producing a data set of outputs, and offer a clear, transparent method for requesting custom developments.
For low/no code development, there’s an interesting whitepaper by Noel Carroll that covers Shell’s approach to “DIY Development” and how they successfully integrated citizen development into their enterprise organization.
But knowing all of the above, the critical question remains: how does one go about resolving the complexity that surrounds EUC? Spreadsheets are used across all firms and are a stealth enterprise risk if left unchecked. Excel underpins so many business processes. But as such a versatile tool, it is a bane and a darling of the financial services industry. People have been trying to tackle EUC Excel problems for years. While some success has been achieved using version control tools and centralized distribution, these solutions only address part of the problem.
Coherent Spark is the answer to EUC challenges
Coherent Spark is the leading response to common EUC problems facing financial institutions in both banking and insurance. It is a new take on how you can still use Excel as a core tool for your business but with full auditability of the logic applied to the IP contained within your spreadsheets. Spark offers auditability in data capture and data changes, as well as exposes analytical or calculation changes. It also solves data persistency, manages data pipeline interoperability, and solves the need for hyper-automation relating to lag, time-to-market, or reporting.
Our platform provides companies the robust data governance protocols around spreadsheets, connected to their legacy technology stack systems, that are driven by EUC.
Here are the key tools that can help you achieve this:
Version Control
When you upload your Excel file to Coherent Spark, the first thing you’ll notice is that you are provided with version control; you’ve just created version one of your services. This means you now have a central repository where you can update your files with release notes and, if there’s an issue, retrieve a previous version.
Centralized Functionality
The next thing you’ll find is that you’ve just created an API endpoint - your Excel logic is now accessible through input and output tags in your file over a secured HTTP connection. It utilizes a universal connection method known as REST which enables you to now consume this logic in other applications, such as Salesforce CRM or another low-code application. With a few clicks and some copy & paste, you can create a service call to empower your applications with complex, Excel-driven logic.
This service is backed by a special compiled version of your spreadsheet that we call a Neuron. It will execute your logic up to one thousand times faster than it can be executed in Excel. So, this means that your logic is now also quickly executable against large datasets. Furthermore, it can also scale to accommodate extremely high volumes of data.
Testing
Now that you have this compiled version of your logic on which you can execute high volumes of data quickly, you can utilize the next feature–our Test Center. This feature can be used to execute large test beds of data which you can either upload manually, with a template or, better yet, can be generated for you by the system for given ranges of data. These tests will be executed lightning-fast in the background, are easily repeatable across versions for regression testing, and are fully audited.
Auditing
The final string to Spark’s bow is its audit logs. Every time the API is used, a log is stored within Spark. This means you can track all activities to the exact time they were executed and see all the data that was passed in and out with the call. Even better than this, you can also download a copy of the spreadsheet that would have been executed if the call had been manually run. From an audit perspective, this shows a potential auditor the exact figures that were used for that particular transaction.
EUC is a hot topic across all industries and comes with a multitude of challenges, the largest among them being the widespread use of Microsoft Excel. Coherent Spark emerges as the world’s leading solution to solve the financial industry’s EUC challenges. It is the world market leader in the remediation of EUC risks associated with the traditional use of Excel.
