In today’s evolving business landscape, the ability to swiftly build analytical models to address emerging needs is crucial for operational efficiency and growth opportunities. This agility is often facilitated by End-User Computing (EUC) solutions, with Excel being a ubiquitous tool across organisations. Excel allows users to rapidly develop models that embed their intellectual property (IP), analyse data, iterate over solutions, and perform calculations without needing to engage corporate IT. For this reason, professionals across various functions rely on Excel daily.

The widespread use of Excel, and the problems it brings

While Excel is powerful and easy to use, it is not without its drawbacks. Spreadsheets initially built as short-term tactical solutions often evolve into core components of business-critical processes. This evolution introduces operational inefficiencies, risks, and scaling limitations due to several factors:



• Combining input data, calculations, and results in the same worksheet, leads to complexity and risk when updating data or assumptions.
• Needing static versions of results leads to duplication of workbooks and multiple versions emerging.
• Embedding comments within workbooks and the lack of unit and regression testing, results in change, audit, and control risks.
• Key person risk, where a single user knows and understands the workbook.
• Challenges in scaling across multiple users and departments accessing the workbook and handling processing and data storage volumes.
• General version and audit control risks.

The EUC-Scaling Gap

Businesses recognise these issues and often wish to develop and deploy an “enterprise IT process” to replace the EUC process. However, the cost and effort to develop an IT solution significantly exceeds the ongoing effort to maintain and extend the EUC process. This situation creates what we call the “EUC-Scaling Gap.”

Several factors contribute to this gap:

• Competing priorities for scarce IT resources.
• The requirement for the EUC process owner to thoroughly document the existing process and specify the IT solution, often with limited knowledge of the full workings of the existing EUC process.
• The resource requirements to test, audit, and sign-off the IT solution.
• The elapsed time to build the solution and specify, develop, and deploy updates with associated delivery risk.
• The inevitable scope creep, infrastructure, IT security, and other development and deployment risks within IT solutions.

As a result, while businesses recognise that the EUC estate is sub-optimal with significant operational risks and scaling limitations, the alternative corporate IT solution is typically not practical or considered high enough priority or cost justified. Consequently, these processes continue to exist, grow, and add further risk and inefficiencies.

Introducing evo-insight

Zenith Actuarial’s evo-insight, enhances scalability, governance, and efficiency, helping firms navigate the EUC scaling gap. It is a no-code, cloud-based platform that embeds the workbook within a governed enterprise web application, quickly solving the EUC problem without huge time, effort, or cost. This approach offers several key benefits:

• Leveraging existing analytics and IP: evo-insight allows users to leverage their existing analytics and IP without modification. There is no need to document, specify, develop, and test the analytics, which significantly reduces the time and effort required to transition from EUC to an enterprise solution.
• Instant updates: Updates to the workbook can be applied in a secure, governed manner, so ownership of the model is maintained, but these then automatically become available in the web application, ensuring that the latest data and models are always in use.
• Workflow automation: evo-insight replicates VBA macros and incorporates workflow and automation, streamlining processes and reducing manual intervention.
• Scalable compute and storage: The platform provides access to scalable compute and storage to parallelize execution and dramatically reduce elapsed processing time.
• Separation of data, comments, and results storage: By separating data, comments, and results storage, evo-insight reduces versioning issues and increases audit control.
• Web application for multi-user access: The platform offers a web application for multi-user access and results dashboard visualisation, facilitating collaboration and real-time updates, whilst avoiding duplication and diversification of workbooks.

Martin Sher, COO of Zenith Actuarial, explains:

"Many firms face a dilemma - Excel offers flexibility, but as models grow in complexity, so do operational risks. evo-insight bridges this gap by transforming EUC processes into governed, scalable enterprise solutions without disrupting existing workflows. Our no-code approach empowers users to retain their intellectual property while ensuring efficiency, compliance, and security."

Empowering Innovation and Efficiency

By bridging the EUC-Scaling Gap, evo-insight enables businesses to maintain the agility of EUC solutions while evolving towards an enterprise IT approach with minimal effort. Its no-code framework democratizes technology, allowing users to build applications and analyse data without technical expertise.

As businesses navigate increasing complexity in data analytics and decision-making, evo-insight provides a seamless solution that balances innovation with governance.

For more information, contact us at enquiries@zenithactuarial.com.