Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

After I finished at university back in the early 90′s, I worked for a few
years at American Express in Brighton. If you’ve been a student in Brighton the
chances are you’ve worked at Amex at some point (their

European processing centre is in the centre of the city) and I worked in the
part of the organisation that settled up with retailers. Part of my work
involved building databases and financial models, and one of the applications I
used was something called Lotus Improv.

Lotus Improv was a new spreadsheet application by the makers of
Lotus 1-2-3, and was
billed as being a revolutionary rethink of how spreadsheets should work. Improv
did away with column and row headings, separated out data from formulas and from
views of the data, and had an approach where you keyed in the data that made up
your model, Improv guessed at what you were trying to do and between you and the
application, the financial model just sort of appeared.

The really cool thing about Improv though was that it let you put together
multi-dimensional worksheets that aren’t a million miles away from the OLAP
applications we work with today. Using Improv, you could put together a regular
rows and columns spreadsheet in a similar fashion to 1-2-3 or Excel, but then
you could go on and name these as for example "Products" and "Time" and then add
additional "dimensions" such as Salesperson, Item, Channel and so forth.

In fact, what you were building up was very similar to the
crosstab interfaces with dimension selectors you get with OracleBI Discoverer and the OracleBI
Spreadsheet Add-in, with the added benefit that you actually entered the data
directly into the spreadsheet rather than having to load it through the OLAP
server first. There’s an

excellent write-up of Improv over at Moose’s Software Valley where you can
see the complete process of building an Improv spreadsheet and doing some
multidimensional analysis.

As well as giving you a spreadsheet interface to an OLAP cube,
Improv also came with a scripting language called Lotus Script that performs
much the same function as Express 4GL and Express Basic.

Not a bad little package actually. Although Improv
originated on the NeXT
platform, the version I used was ported to Windows 3.1 back in 1993 and it
sold for around 100, for which you got a desktop OLAP server, a pretty capable
spreadsheet and what was considered to be a powerful scripting language. So,
where did it all go wrong?

From speaking to a few guys in the office who used to work for
the OLAP vendors of the time, the likes of Comshare, Holos and IRI were worried
about Improv at the time as it had much the same functionality as product such
as Holos and Express but with
the backing of Lotus, who at the time were number one in the spreadsheet market
with 1-2-3. In the end though, Lotus marketed Improv more as "spreadsheets done
right" (referring to the separation of data and formulas, and the more rigid
structure of an Improv model) rather than it’s OLAP capabilities, which
unfortunately had the effect of confusing those customers who now had to choose
between 1-2-3 and Improv, and instead chose Microsoft Excel instead. From an
architecture viewpoint, Improv was also limited by the fact that its cubes ran
in memory rather than being paged to disk, so it was always limited in what it
could hold, especially with the typical amount of memory a PC had then, and so
in the end was never really the threat to vendors such as IRI and Holistic
Systems that it could have been. Still, it’s an interesting historical footnote
and the technology, or at least the approach, still lives on today in the Pivot
Tables you get with Microsoft Excel, and a product called
Quantrix that

aims to recreate much of the same functionality that Lotus Improv had.

If you’re interested in reading a bit more about Lotus Improv,
here’s a few good resources:

• 
  Moose’s Greatest Software Products of All Time : Lotus Improv

• 
  Wikipedia article on Lotus Improv

• The Story of
  Improv

• Why Good
  Ideas Fail

• 
  Why Improv Didn’t Succed

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