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Authors

Yusuf Jafry, Fredrika Sidoroff, & Roger Chi

Abstract

We present Risk Integrated's Enterprise Spreadsheet Platform (ESP), a technical approach to the near-elimination of spreadsheet risk in the enterprise computing environment, whilst maintaining the full flexibility of spreadsheets for modelling complex financial structures and processes.

In its Basic Mode of use, the system comprises a secure and robust centralised spreadsheet management framework. In Advanced Mode, the system can be viewed as a robust computational framework whereby users can "submit jobs" to the spreadsheet, and retrieve the results from the computations, but with no direct access to the underlying spreadsheet.

An example application, Monte Carlo simulation, is presented to highlight the benefits of this approach with regard to mitigating spreadsheet risk in complex, mission-critical, financial calculations.

Sample

Enterprise Spreadsheet Platform architecture
Enterprise Spreadsheet Platform architecture

Risk Integrated's Enterprise Spreadsheet Platform (ESP) represents a secure spreadsheet management framework whereby the spreadsheets themselves are exposed only to a select few designated experts ("superusers") in the organisation.

These users have the responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the spreadsheet models, and for "uploading" their tested and "signed-off" versions to a centralised server/database.

Publication

2006, EuSpRIG

Full article

A computational framework for the near elimination of spreadsheet risk