I remember my second year at the university (Studying Computer Science for those who wonder). I wrote an Intel 8086 Assembly program that monitored the keyboard and interfaced directly with the printer (a 9 pin Epson dot printer, no less) to print a letter whenever a certain keyword was typed. I was very happy with my program as it handled all the interrupts really well and was very efficient. If memory serves, I even got a perfect score for it too.

Next day I started a campaign to rid the world of those superfluous printer drivers, replacing these inefficient pieces of software with custom code, whenever something needed printing. As you can guess, the first paragraph is true, but the second one is not. Using assembly, grants you endless flexibility; by writing your own code you can get exactly what you want.  However, in real life, assembly is a language of last resort. It will waste your time and energy figuring out how to print a single character, instead of focusing on the important things, such as writing that amazing novel. In real life, the key is to focus on the essence and not the technicalities.

What does this have to do with RA? As it turns out, I have just read a discussion in LinkedIn in which 3 people were telling how great Excel is for doing RA. Certainly, Excel is a very versatile tool and can even be used as an RA tool. I would even go further and say that in some cases I would recommend it as a good tool for quick and dirty check of limited data. However, automation, tracing, follow up and reusability require more than a generic tool. RA is so much more than comparing two columns of data (and yes, I am aware that Excel is much more than that). The RA practitioner should focus on the investigation and resolution of problems and leave tasks that can be automated to the tool. BTW, do you remember how many leakages started in badly maintained reference tables in Excel? Do you want your RA findings to be so cumbersome?

Before you attack me, I admit and have never hidden the fact that I work for a RA systems vendor. However I also believe that billing should be done by a billing system and not by a clever little macro in Excel.Incidentally, if you hear of an opening for a Telecom billing system programmer in Assembly (or excel), let me know.