Do You Ask IT to Edit Your Spreadsheet?

Krista is like Excel

How long would it take to complete your work if IT had to edit your spreadsheet when you needed changes?

It’s not feasible.

If every spreadsheet edit or change required a formal requirements definition, you would overwhelm your support systems with trivial requests. IT would never prioritize these requests because it works on more critical tasks. Your spreadsheet requests would sit in a queue–forever.

Despite the earnest efforts of super smart people, IT systems move slowly compared to your spreadsheet. They have to because they are code. Changing code potentially creates flaws or unintended consequences that must be thought through and tested before becoming real. And, those coding changes take skilled people using specific techniques you don’t have.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, at least not for most process automation changes.

Code vs. Content

Microsoft Excel is code.

Google Sheets is code.

The letters and numbers in the cells are content.

Businesspeople use the many features and functions in Excel or Sheets to do all types of things. Some use spreadsheets for straightforward things like a single row of data with a name, address, and phone number. Others use Excel to track inventory levels, sales results, or expenses. Some people even use Excel as rudimentary databases or to write small programs that do things like report generation or analysis.

Changing Content vs. Changing Code

Changing content is easy.

Changing code is hard.

If you wanted a new feature in Excel, you’d follow a software development lifecycle (SDLC) process like the above. You’d write up your requirement and lobby Microsoft to deploy a new release of Excel with your feature (good luck!).

But, your sheet is content.

You just change it when you want to.

Your sheet doesn’t need to go through an SDLC process when you make changes to the content because Excel shields its code from you through a series of UI command and function definitions. You can use any feature without requiring a “testable event” or promoting it in the latest release. You most likely practice change management — you probably keep an old version and have colleagues sanity check your work. But you don’t build, dev test, unit test, integration test, and performance test it. And, you don’t hire programming teams to modify your spreadsheet.

Your spreadsheet can keep up with you and your dynamic business; IT’s SDLC cannot.

Automation is Content

Krista works just like your spreadsheet. Krista and its connections to systems are code, but your processes, apps, interfaces, communication channels, business logic, rules, and much of your AI is content. Just like your spreadsheet.

To connect to a new system, that’s code, and it might need a software cycle to complete. That depends on whether or not the Krista Connector exists. Many off-the-shelf systems and SaaS are already in Krista’s catalog. Adding a new one is simple, and we add new ones constantly. We’ll do that for you free of charge if other enterprises would want to connect that system as well.

But when your business needs change, that’s typically not related to systems but to market dynamics, customer demands, or new opportunities to use existing system capabilities in a different way: that’s content. And changing that content to respond to the business is as fast as changing your spreadsheet.

You just change it when you want to.

Even with system integration?

Many “low-code” application platforms require a “paste your code here” step to connect to systems. This step is a “testable event,” as I talked about earlier. IT will need to test it to make sure everything works as intended.

But Krista is entirely different. We eliminated all the testable events when modifying content so that you don’t need to worry about them. Just like the AVG() or DATEDIFF() functions in Excel, you use prebuilt code without triggering a software development cycle. You can change your content without waiting on IT or worrying about code. And rather than make you understand how your system APIs work, Krista makes technology understand you. Krista’s natural language processing enables you to ask systems to do things or provide information using simple, human language. Krista works out the rest.

‘If you like your spreadsheet…’

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the reference. If you don’t get it, that’s probably a good thing…

Krista not only gives you spreadsheet speed with process automation, but she also provides tremendous process automation power to the spreadsheets you already have.

Let’s face it, the lack of proper input validation, user/role-based access controls to sheets or columns, the lack of proper change management, and the inability for those sheets to reach out to people or systems dramatically limits their potential.

Krista will use your spreadsheets.

Krista ingests your spreadsheet, limits data access based on user privilege, validates inputs to ensure no garbage-in/garbage-out problem, triggers automation and activities, and integrates other people and systems into the process.

Krista can then recreate your spreadsheet to get the best of both worlds.

Hey, we love the charting and easy what-if analysis of spreadsheets too!

So think of Krista in part as adding process automation muscle to your existing sheets.

See for yourself

Krista enables change in minutes, not months. The more automated your business, the more imperative this becomes.

Ask us to prove it. We’ll make meaningful changes to business outcomes on a live demo and auto-deploy them to users for immediate business impact. You haven’t seen anything like it.