Starbucks is to coffee like Foxtrot is to…

Well, not exactly.

Richard Milam (inventor of Foxtrot) and I were sitting outside the Starbucks inside the Fabulous Marriott Marquis in Atlanta. Attending yet another trade show.

As we talked, Richard started musing about how spreadsheets had changed the business exec world, and how Foxtrot was just like that in the world of data.

“What?”, I said. “How’s that?”

So Richard patiently walked me through his thinking. Back before computer-based spreadsheets came along, running a business, making smart decisions, was really a challenging thing to do. Data was inaccessible, squirreled away on some mainframe computer. The only way to get it was to ask for reports, which then had to be poured over and analyzed, and studied. The data the execs needed belonged to the IT department, and it was difficult to get at.

“Ah”, I said. “I remember those days well. We had to do spreadsheets manually. Get the data, then transfer it by hand into a spreadsheet. Then if we made a change, we had to manually erase and enter the new data, and then we had to add all the columns again to make sure everything ‘balanced’. Pretty tedious stuff.”

“And what happened when spreadsheets were introduced to the desktop computer?”, he asked.

I knew that one. I had been responsible for managing a $5 million budget and had to make a monthly report on how we were doing. The first time I used a spreadsheet on my desktop and all that manual stuff got automated – wowzer! It was a revelation.

It saved me a ton of time PLUS I couldn’t make mistakes in the content. The computer automatically added the columns and rows. I knew instantly if there was a mistake.

Now imagine, says Richard, if that little thing you were doing was a revelation, what was going on in the CFO and CEO offices. Suddenly they could not only access and use the data they needed quickly and accurately – they could now slice it and dice it and analyze it. All in a fraction of the time it used to take.

IT departments now had to deliver that sacred data to the desktops in executive offices. And almost as suddenly, the ownership of the data shifted – from the IT group into the hands of the company leadership.

As basic as that sounds, it also led the way to the whole ERP revolution. Where all the critical operations data was delivered to a single location in real-time, so smarter decisions could be made faster and with more confidence.

“Soooo”, I droned on. “What does that have to do with Foxtrot?”

“Think of it this way”, says Richard. “Spreadsheets are to finance and management like Foxtrot is to data.”

“Before Foxtrot”, he continued, “the people who are responsible for handling data had their hands tied by custom programming. They could only do what the custom program said they could do. Kind of like the way execs used to get data from IT – it came one way and that was the end of it.

The other similarity is that so much data is still being handled manually. Just like the example you gave me with your budget spreadsheet example. Working with data manually is not only tedious and time consuming – it’s also fraught with errors because it is being handled by human beings.

And the third thing is, these same people are “locked down”. There are restrictions and rules and guidelines that have to be strictly adhered to.  Accesses that have to be granted. And so on and so on.”

So I jumped in and finished it for him. With Foxtrot, you can access, move, update, merge data automatically – without outside involvement or programming.

And you automatically adhere to all the business rules, audit standards and security restrictions because it accesses the data the same way a user does. Through the desktop.

“You got it”, responded Richard. “You can marshal data - move data, manage data, merge data, maintain data – automatically. And you can transition data between systems.

It’s similar to spreadsheets in another way: once you develop a Foxtrot script – the ‘formula’, if you will - it deals with the data exactly the way you set it up. Every time.

And in my very humble opinion, setting up Foxtrot scripts is a whole lot easier than setting up spreadsheet formulas.”

Once again, Richard nails it.

We finished our coffee and off to the show. At the Fabulous Marriott Marquis (and it is fabulous – best sports bar I’ve ever been to, and great customer focus, too.)

Foxtrot is to data as spreadsheets are to finance and management. Hmmmm. Richard forgot to mention something else, but that’s for a blog another day.

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