A CIO described his monthly reporting cycle to us recently, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it.
His senior managers keep their numbers in spreadsheets. At month end they take a screenshot of the spreadsheet, paste the image into a PowerPoint slide, and email the deck to him. That is the report. That is what informs the executive view of whether a multi-million-rand programme is working.
He was not describing a small department. And he had bought the analytics licences years ago.
What actually goes wrong here
It is tempting to read this as incompetence. It is not, and treating it that way guarantees you never fix it.
Every person in that chain is doing something rational. The manager has their numbers in a spreadsheet because that is where they have always been and it works. The screenshot is faster than reformatting. The slide is what the meeting format demands. The email is how things get submitted. Each step is locally sensible and the aggregate is a system that cannot answer a question.
Because look at what arrives at the top: an image. It cannot be sorted. It cannot be filtered. It cannot be compared against last month without opening last month's deck and comparing by eye. Nobody can ask "show me only the districts that got worse" — which is precisely the question an executive is there to ask.
So the executive does the only thing available: forms an impression, and makes decisions on it. That is the actual cost. Not the wasted licences — the guesswork at the top of an organisation that has, somewhere in its systems, the data to do better.
The investment was made. The capability wasn't.
The frustrating part for the CIO in that conversation was that he had done his job as he understood it. Licences procured. Platform available. Budget defended.
The gap is in the last row, and it is not a technology row.
An analytics platform changes nothing until the people receiving reports change what they ask for. As long as a photograph of a spreadsheet is accepted as a valid submission, it will keep being submitted — because it is the cheapest thing that clears the bar. The bar is the control, not the tool.
This is why "we bought Power BI and nobody uses it" is such a common story, and why buying something else does not fix it. One person somewhere was trained. They have another job. Nobody above them has ever declined a deck for not being queryable.
A dashboard nobody is required to look at is a screensaver.
Data is impartial, and that is the point
There is a line from that same conversation that I keep coming back to: information has no feelings in it. It tells you what is happening, whether or not that is what anyone hoped was happening.
That is the actual value proposition, and it is worth being blunt that it is also the actual resistance. A photographed spreadsheet is not only inefficient — it is unfalsifiable. Nobody can drill into it and find the district that has been quietly failing for eight months. A live view can. Some of the reluctance you meet in these programmes is not technical conservatism; it is a reasonable read that this will make things visible that were comfortable being invisible.
Worth naming honestly, because it explains resistance that otherwise looks irrational, and it tells you something about which sponsor to look for. You want the one who wants to know.
This is not only a public sector problem
I want to head off the obvious reading. The example above is government, and this series is largely drawn from public-sector work — but the pattern is not a public-sector pathology.
We have seen the same thing inside a large, well-run, staff-heavy private company: shift allocation on paper, leave tracked informally, and every peak season an expensive scramble for temporary staff because nobody could say in advance who would actually be at work. Manual, invisible, and costing real margin every year. The people running it were not unsophisticated. It had simply never been anyone's job to fix.
Corporates are further along on average. They are nowhere near as far along as their own executives believe.
What the first move actually is
The instinct at this point is to propose the fix: a warehouse, a governance framework, a proper reporting layer. That instinct is correct about the destination and wrong about the opening, and getting that wrong is how most of these programmes die before they start.
The next article in this series is about the move that does work — starting with one form rather than one platform. What matters here is the diagnosis:
The reporting problem is not a reporting problem. It is a collection problem wearing a reporting problem's clothes. The photograph exists because the underlying numbers were never captured in a structured, queryable way in the first place. Buy every analytics licence available and you still have a spreadsheet at the bottom of the chain.
Fix what happens at the point of capture and the photograph stops being necessary. Leave capture alone and no amount of tooling above it will help.
How CloudNala can help
Most organisations we meet in this position do not need to be convinced there is a problem — the CIO usually described it to us before we asked. What is missing is a first move small enough to actually happen. We tend to start by finding the one process where structured capture would change a real decision, and building that, rather than opening with a platform proposal that will be agreed with and not funded.
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