Workscope

Workscope’s Discovery module automatically discovers and inventories your EUC assets across both networks and desktops, in real time, including assets that may not already be known or visible to you. It then assesses these assets, running a full diagnostic on each file and identifying its structure, data lineage, resource-usage, potential formula errors, and so on, allowing you to remediate based on these factors.

In this way, it discovers both EUC assets themselves and the risk associated with them. It will also identify sensitive data within both your EUC assets and other text documents. Specifically, it can detect PII (Personally Identifiable Information), health information, and payment information as defined by various compliance regulations, including GDPR, CPRA, HIPAA, APPI, and QPA. Moreover, this discovery process leverages natural language models to provide contextual awareness that can help accurately identify sensitive data.

This discovery process acts continuously and in real-time, with or without using agents, and can therefore drive remediating actions in real-time. This is a notable differentiator: many other suppliers in this space only capture changes or additions on a scheduled, rather than a continuous, basis. The platform also analyses how files are being used, providing an additional layer of visibility that delivers insights into how operational processes are happening on the ground. This can be used, for example, to assess the potential ROI for process transformation.

The end result is that Workscope constantly monitors all of your EUC assets, handles the lion’s share automatically, and only presents you with the most critical and exceptional issues. This allows you to focus your efforts on the most pressing and most taxing problems – the ones that must be handled manually – while still maintaining control over your entire EUC system.

Discovery operates without introducing any additional latency into your business processes. It surfaces usage statistics for your EUC assets (including VBA code, APIs and so on), and in the case of spreadsheets these can be viewed from inside the spreadsheets themselves as well as in the Workscope platform.

Data lineage is available down to the attribute level across your spreadsheet and database estate, including, say, data ingested from proprietary or third-party sources like Bloomberg or Reuters. Effectively, the platform will tell you what data (including third-party data) is being used by your spreadsheets as well as where and how it is being used. Moreover, usage monitoring extends to such things as highlighting files that have a large number of users, which can help to determine the importance of a spreadsheet to the business. Snapshots can be used to prove to regulators that identified errors have been fixed.

Much of the information provided by the Discovery module is visualised via its built-in dashboard, which is customisable to your organisation via a library of provided templates. If further customisation is desired, the product can be integrated with dedicated data visualisation tooling (such as Power BI) via its API. Moreover, several features are provided, such as the presentation of information in natural language, to make the product more approachable to non-technical users.

Fig 1 - Workscope Governance module

The Governance module (shown in Figure 1) allows you to create policies that automatically assess and inventory risk within your spreadsheets (other EUC assets are not currently supported) using configurable risk factors defined within each policy. They can also be used to automatically act on your data, and sensitive data in particular. Policies are created using a no-code builder, and during policy creation the platform will recommend various criteria that may be helpful for determining risk.

Users of Excel spreadsheets or other Microsoft Office documents that fit the policy criteria (typically by containing purportedly sensitive information) are sent a questionnaire (also created using a no-code builder) within the product they are using in order to inform them of the provisional classification (with justification) and allow them to provide any clarifying information or attestations that might be needed. These questionnaires can also be used to issue instructions, such as in the event that sensitive data is present and needs to be manually protected. The risk attached to spreadsheets that newly enter your system is detected automatically, without needing to move them to any particular location, and their risk profile is classified accordingly.

Reasoning is provided to explain the risk classification of each file. A holistic view of risk is also available via visualised risk matrices.

Finally, the Analysis module is designed to analyse your EUC assets in a variety of ways, with the primary purpose of detecting opportunities for transformation (hence its name). To this end, it can use cluster analysis to check your files against each other and detect any similarities (up to and including total duplication) that may indicate that a single file has been branched into multiple, now semi-distinct, assets.

This can be important for keeping track of multiple instances of the same data, whether the goal is to make sure they all stay in sync, to merge the disparate files back together, or to replace them with, say, an analytics model. Generative AI can be leveraged for a higher-level cluster analysis that is more focused on determining if you have multiple files doing the same thing (and which are therefore ripe for consolidation) than on finding specific duplicates. As part of this process, the module uses AI to describe what your EUC assets (and the code contained within them) are doing and how they are interacting with the rest of your system – a useful piece of functionality in and of itself.

Spreadsheets (and to a less frequent extent other EUC assets) often carry important business logic, but almost as often remain unmanaged and ungoverned. In the age of GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and other stringent compliance mandates, this state of affairs has moved from merely undesirable to actively intolerable. The financial and reputational risks inherent in leaving these things to shadow IT are simply too high to justify not investing in a product like Workscope.

Said product helps you to understand and organise your EUC assets while giving you the information you need to intelligently move data and processes away from EUC where necessary in order to ameliorate risk. What’s more, it simultaneously enables you to identify areas ripe for transformations and modernisations that may serve to improve the efficiency and increase the automation of your overall system. The platform also stands out due to its real-time nature and its insights-based approach to EUC governance. Its regulatory reporting functionality is a particular draw: being able to extract business and risk intelligence about any of your EUC assets in real-time makes it quite easy to demonstrate to a regulator that you have things well in hand with regards to risk and compliance. We also like the automated and targeted nature of the analysis that Workscope provides, as it saves a significant amount of time by reducing manual work. Moreover, due to the way it presents, say, risk information, it is easy to look (literally, due to the visualisation element) at your spreadsheet intelligence and find the outliers that you need to address urgently.

While Discovery is the most mature of the three modules contained in the platform, the Governance and Analysis modules are nevertheless feature-rich and production-ready. They also show significant potential for further development, and the inclusion of machine learning and generative AI will no doubt turn some heads. We look forward to seeing how they develop in the future.

The bottom line

Workscope offers continuous asset discovery, intelligence, and governance to spreadsheets in specific and EUCs in general. It is certainly worthy of your attention.