AI Can Help Integrate Data, But What About the Organization?
Years ago, when I regularly did corporate IT strategy work, it was not unusual to find major companies generating unified monthly financial reports across multiple divisions using massive spreadsheets. These were laboriously constructed—sometimes manually—from files produced by different systems with different data formats and definitions. Sometimes the data transformations were automated, but often they were not.
I remember one client where we were asked to estimate the savings from consolidating major software systems. Doing so required inserting ourselves into the monthly manual financial consolidation process as unobtrusively as possible.
Easier said than done. On one of my first days, I walked into a large office area and found more than a dozen junior analysts, all recruited from a major financial firm that shall remain nameless, laboring over the monthly consolidated report. They were converting data for loading into one massive spreadsheet used to generate the report.
The whole process was a bit stressful. Based on my experience with systems integration projects, I knew that a change in one system, if not caught in time, could cause chaos in the final consolidation steps. My immediate concern was somehow extracting IT-related costs from those multiple systems. That process turned out to be every bit the nightmare I had anticipated.
That was a long time ago, but the image of that massive, bloated spreadsheet has remained in my mind—along with the army of eager young analysts laboring away with their macros and conversion steps.
Things are different today, thank goodness. Or are they? Spreadsheets are certainly much smarter and more sophisticated than in the olden days. Individual cells can trigger AI routines that respond much more quickly to upstream changes. AI tools may also have been used in developing, updating, and testing the software changes themselves.
One might even hypothesize that AI-based software, with its responsiveness to change, has not only made that army of young analysts unnecessary but also reduced the need to replace multiple systems with a single unified system. Changes in individual systems can now be addressed much faster. Add the real-time interactivity of contemporary AI tools, and the need for management to even to see that massive, unified spreadsheet may have gone out the window.
Or has it?
There are several reasons why the nirvana described above may have its shortcomings.
There is the question of necessary process change and the need to incorporate human judgment at key points. We know that changing systems can be closely tied to changing human processes, and automating the planning and management of those changes can be tricky indeed.
Even if AI tools can simplify the integration of data-intensive systems across organizations—for example, when two or more companies' IT operations are consolidated before or after a merger—we still have to deal with the different goals and objectives of the management teams that ran those companies. AI tools can certainly help, but human goals and objectives are harder to consolidate than data definitions. How the AI tools are used can itself become a bone of contention when operations are being merged.
When data from multiple systems and processes are consolidated, where should human judgment enter the process? Some decisions must be made instantly: what to project on the heads-up display of a supersonic fighter targeting an opponent in aerial combat, or how to respond to a cyberattack threatening to shut down a hospital's automated pharmaceutical management systems. At what point does inserting a “human in the loop” become impossible, and at what point is it absolutely essential?
The army of junior analysts laboring over that huge, bloated spreadsheet did not have to worry about such questions. They were far beyond their pay grade. But my team and I, inserted into the reporting process after the fact, certainly could have used modern AI tools to help us out!
Copyright © 2026 by Dennis D. McDonald. The above graphic was generated by ChatGPT after a lengthy dialog that started with my typing “I need a clean, simple abstract graphic to illustrate the above concept of using AI to consolidate systems and processes -- but somehow making sure to incorporate human judgement when necessary and appropriate. Any suggestions for how to proceed with that?”
