Spreadsheets are good and fine until they're not (fine-grained permissions, collaboration, referential integrity and validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation and ingestion, easy visibility into history and auditing, features that Excel has but people don't want to learn, etc).
All of the things you just mentioned could be handled using just two mechanisms:
1) An extremely low friction way of flowing data to/from spreadsheets
2) Automated publishing/versioning
If a particular piece of automation for flowing data between and in/out of spreadsheets is the lowest friction for users, then that will be the way they use by default. Then that software will be able to provide collaboration, fine-grained permissions, referential integrity, validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation, ingestion, and auditing. Tracking versions takes care of the rest. The trick isn't providing all of those facilities. We've known how to do that for many years. The trick is to provide all of those with near zero friction.
What's needed is something like Dropbox, plus dataflow. Just let users save their files, and it gets versioned and uploaded into "staging" for the dataflow part without their having to do anything. Then, as people start running into issues of scaling, enforcement, etc, enable them to start incrementally adopting more administration features -- all while preserving the transparent "it just works" magic of their just saving the file.
All of the things you just mentioned could be handled using just two mechanisms:
If a particular piece of automation for flowing data between and in/out of spreadsheets is the lowest friction for users, then that will be the way they use by default. Then that software will be able to provide collaboration, fine-grained permissions, referential integrity, validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation, ingestion, and auditing. Tracking versions takes care of the rest. The trick isn't providing all of those facilities. We've known how to do that for many years. The trick is to provide all of those with near zero friction.What's needed is something like Dropbox, plus dataflow. Just let users save their files, and it gets versioned and uploaded into "staging" for the dataflow part without their having to do anything. Then, as people start running into issues of scaling, enforcement, etc, enable them to start incrementally adopting more administration features -- all while preserving the transparent "it just works" magic of their just saving the file.