Fun fact: there was no IT department in ancient Rome...

... but that didn't stop the giant empire from operating. Also, that didn't stop from operating the ancient Egypt and Greece. The great Mayan Empire never had it either.

You see, the people who we call today "business users" could keep empires operational for centuries just with a pen, a piece of paper, and a bean counter (or whatever it replaced back then).

Why? Because they had agency in regard to data. They could freely maintain records as well as add, subtract, divide, and multiply whatever data they had on whatever business function they performed - harvesting and storing grain, preparing lumber, building ships, or planning meals for a legion of soldiers. If you look at the old manuscripts of any ancient civilization on Earth, most of them are just casual business transactions - records about what was purchased/stored/consumed and in what quantity.

Of course, calculating all that manually wasn't efficient. It was tedious as well as time- and resource-consuming, but they could do it on their own. Always.

What's interesting is that it was the norm for centuries, even millennia. Just think about it: so-called "business users" had their data agency for ages until very recently. Until when exactly? Until computers and databases.

Computers and databases have brought unimaginable productivity gains in general, but they also deprived "business users" of their data agency. The almighty IT department was born. From that point on, the people who knew business lost the ability to manage their data freely, and those who had the technical skills didn't have proficiency in the business domains (well, that's not the skillset they get paid for).

Partially, the problem was alleviated by the appearence of spreadsheets. With them, the "business users" have won some of their data agency back. But just some of it. Far not enough.

Arguably, the data analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) industry has made things worse. It has introduced more abstraction layers between business data and business users and that complexity has taken away even more agency. I suspect the industry has long been following its own imaginary path. BI standardization, yay! Dashboards, yay! Big Data, yay! It still keeps following it: you can see it from all the GenAI craze going on (did the users ever ask about it? what exactly problem does it solve?)

Need one more proof that the BI industry is out of touch with their main consumers? Here it is: every decision-maker in an organization knows that decisions are based on quantitative information (such as metrics or aggregated data trends) and qualitative information (risks, goals, initiatives, competitors' actions, etc.). Yet, for almost 30 years, the industry has been overly focused on the quantitative part but entirely ignored the qualitative. So now we're talking about whether buttons in dashboards should have rounded corners or not instead of discussing what really matters.

Therefore, my dear BI developers, consultants, and experts: don't get too surprised when people use your pixel-perfect dashboards you spent weeks designing in Figma only to import their datasets to Excel. Alas, your dashboards don't give them agency. Spreadsheets do.

Don't ask why your dashboards get so little attention — they have no life. Business decision-making has never been solely about quantitative data. Life happens where the qualitative information is — in chats, emails, and cell annotations in spreadsheets. Where people cooperate and communicate.

The BI industry has always preferred seeing and treating business users as kids. It likes coddling them - "Hey, kiddie, just push that nice easy button and the big smart machine constructed by more knowledgeable people out there will think for you and let you know what they think you need to know."

That's not right.

I firmly believe that huge productivity gains and a better work culture are unlocked when "business users" restore their data agency, and that agency is respected by technical teams. For that, data software must be simpler and more controllable. This is the opposite of what we see on the market, where data software every year becomes bloated with insignificant features and opaque mechanisms that no one understands exactly how they work.

Simple software is always based on a simple understandable principle. Excel is based on a simple concept, and therefore it's popular. We need more software like that.

And I'm not just saying that. For the last 10 years, our team and I have been building EasyMorph. It's a data productivity tool built on a simple principle: pick and drop configurable actions one after another to create visual workflows that automate your data. This simple idea can be used in multiple ways - the workflows can consolidate and transform data, automate routine data manipulations, and you can use them to explore and retrieve data and documents no matter where they are stored. No magic, full clarity, and total control of the inputs and outputs. It can't be simpler than that! EasyMorph is already used by hundreds of organizations, and judging by the feedback we receive, it looks like we're on the right path to our mission: to bring back data agency for the "business users".

After all, they had it for centuries.

Random remarks

• If you want to take Excel away from people, give them something that gives them more agency, not less. Between two data tools, business users will always prefer the tool that gives them more agency.

• When relational databases appeared, SQL was initially intended for business users. However, instead of becoming a companion for spreadsheets, it morphed into a highly technical and nuanced query language.

• In the BI industry, Tableau was a rare exception that actually managed to give business people back some data agency. However, it appears to me they lost focus years before being acquired by Salesforce.

• Data agency also assumes the freedom to create and manage business records. There are multiple ongoing attempts in this area, such as Airtable or SharePoint Lists, and I'm sure we will see more -- this trend is unstoppable. Interestingly, MS Access was just one step away from that, but Microsoft never really understood it.