An empirical study on spreadsheet shortcomings from an information systems perspective

Abstract

The use of spreadsheets to support business processes is widespread in industry. Due to their criticality in the context of those business processes, spreadsheet shortcomings can significantly hamper an organization’s business operation. However, it is still unclear, what actual and typical shortcomings of spreadsheets applied as information systems are. Therefore, in this paper we present the results of an empirical study on spreadsheet shortcomings from an information systems perspective. In this sense, we focus particularly on how spreadsheets perform in their respective business context. The result of our work is a list of 20 shortcomings which typically occur in practice.