Douglas Purdy

Reading my recent posts, I hope you can see the potential around the Open Data Protocol (OData) as it makes its way into more and more of our and others products.

Pablo does a nice job of outlining a key business scenario in OData: The Movie, but I want to use this post to outline a personal scenario that is crying out for OData.

In doing so, I hope that you will join me in pushing for more Web sites/services to expose their your data over open protocols.

[Note:  The high order bit for me is Open Data.  OData is a mechanism that we have found some success using to achieve this goal.  It is important not to confuse mechanism with goal.  I am not confused and readers should not be either.]

Scenario: Monthly Net Worth

I have an Excel worksheet to calculate net worth.  It compute this number as a way of smoothing out betas and ensuring that I am on track toward our financial goals.  This “app” consists of a bunch of tabs with financial information (stock, salary, bank accounts, etc.), with macros to create roll-ups and then charts to report.

You may wonder why I don’t use Quicken or one of the many other financial tools out there.  The answer is simple.  For me, these applications are chains; they do not let me interact with my data in the flexible, transparent and empowering way that Excel does.

This is the exact reason that I see many business being run from Excel rather than packaged software.  It is also the reason that many enterprise IT shops have what is called an “Excel/Access Problem” (business units/departments building “applications” like rabbits that are not under management).

I only have one issue with my solution: I have to screen scrape all of my data.

I screen scrape stock information.  I copy and paste from a number of different locations.  I automated what I could, but in the end, the data acquisition cost is high, very high.  I will pay that cost, however, because the power that I get from Excel is worth more to me.

Now that Excel (via PowerPivot) supports OData, I see light at the end of the tunnel.  What I now need are feeds.  OData feeds from my brokerage.  OData feeds from Microsoft.  OData feeds from my bank.  OData feeds from the California and US governments. 

With feeds like that and a “data workbench” like Excel, you can control your financial destiny like never before.  It is this empowerment that I personally crave and it is this empowerment that is at the heart of my personal vision.

Call to Action

My good friend James Conard, is always hammering on me to have a clear call to action (I should hammer on him to update his blog).

If you work in the financial industry: Please push to expose your data via an HTTP-based open protocol like OData.  I think it would be interesting to consider how to tunnel OFX through OData.  I am going to follow-up with some our teams internally about it.

If you work in government agencies like the IRS & SSA in the US: Ditto.

If you are would like to use Excel to access this kind of data:  Tell your bank, brokerage, local government official about OData (or something like it) and tell them you want it.

A Closing Note…

There are a host of what you may consider “altruistic” scenarios for OData.  I don’t want those to get lost in the self-interest that drives this scenario and post.  I’ll be writing a lot more about these scenarios in the near future.  I just happened to be running my “Worth Report” (interesting name that, particularly for the philosophical minded), so it was top of mind.