From the top of the Eiffel Tower, gaze out over Paris. Stand under the Tower and gaze up through the girders. With a bottle of good wine — from Printemps, say, or Galeries Lafayette — soften your awe at the Tower's structure and engineering discipline. Structure and engineering discipline are qualities not to be found in your average spreadsheet, which is why I'm going to the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group 2009 Conference next week, July 2–3, in the Cachan suburb of Paris.
Cachan is easy to get to from the centre of Paris by RER train. There's a map, as well as tourist info and a draft conference programme, on the conference site. If you're worried about Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, or otherwise interested in making spreadsheets less risky to program and use, consider coming along. I'm busy preparing a tutorial for the conference — on the theme that you should document and specify your spreadsheet before you code it — so I'd better get on with that. But for more info, here's the EuSpRIG press release.
Experts From Europe and North America meet to discuss the rôle of spreadsheets in organisational excellence at the 10th annual spreadsheet risks conference on July 2-3 in Paris, France.
Cardiff, UK, June 16, 2009 — The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (EuSpRIG), is holding its 2009 conference The Rôle of Spreadsheets in Organisational Excellence on the 2nd–3rd July 2009 at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Paris, France.
The keynote speakers are Dr Louise Pryor, Director of the UK Board for Actuarial Standards and a member of the UK's Financial Reporting Council and Dr Martin Erwig, Associate Professor of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, USA.
Grenville Croll, EuSpRIG chair commented: "We welcome our delegates and presenters to Paris and to the 10th Annual EuSpRIG Conference. It is a considerable achievement for any organisation, especially a non-profit and voluntary organisation such as EuSpRIG, to be able to celebrate this important anniversary with such an interesting, expansive and international programme". Croll cautioned that "Most people do not appreciate the important rôle that spreadsheets play in our modern society. Nor do they appreciate the risks that we are running with this out of control but ubiquitous technology". On a happier note, he concluded: "Here at EuSpRIG we offer thought leadership and guidance on the technical and human aspects of examining, containing and controlling spreadsheet technology".
Speakers include: Susan Allen of HBOS who will be discussing Excel Modelling, Transparency, Auditing and Business use; Grenville Croll of Spreadsheet Engineering Ltd who will be introducing his paper on Spreadsheets and the Financial Collapse; Angela Collins of BDO Stoy Hayward who will describe her work as an Embedded Spreadsheet Modeller and Drs Sriram Iyengar and John Svirbely of www.medal.org and the University of Texas, who will describe their monumental Medical Algorithms project.
Bill Bekenn and Ray Hooper from Fairway Associates will present their curiously, but very appropriately entitled paper Some Spreadsheet Poka-Yoke. Professor Tom Grossman and colleagues will be travelling from the University of California, San Francisco to present their work on using the Lookup Technique to Replace Nested-if formulas. The host team of Françoise Tort, François-Marie Blondel and Éric Bruillard will discuss their findings regarding the relationship between errors detection and behaviour observation. They will be joined by their Belgian colleague Étienne Vandeput from the Université de Liège who will look at some milestones involved in teaching spreadsheet programs.
Matthew Dinmore from the University of Maryland Baltimore, Dr Kevin McDaid and team from the Dundalk Institute of Technology and a number of individual consultants including Patrick O'Beirne, Angus Dunn, Sebastian Dewhurst and John Hunt complete the line-up of seventeen papers in total.
EuSpRIG (www.eusprig.org) offers Risk Managers the world's only independent, authoritative & comprehensive web based information describing the current state of the art in Spreadsheet Risk Management. We run a well-established annual conference which provides a forum for researchers, practitioners, trainers, vendors, consultants and auditors. EuSpRIG's entire peer reviewed proceedings are published on the publicly accessible Cornell University moderated scientific repository www.arxiv.org. EuSpRIG provide speakers and content for professional societies, associations, conferences and journals. EuSpRIG is a not-for-profit organisation governed by an elected committee operating under the terms of a written constitution. Committee members include senior managers and directors of leading accounting firms and senior academics from European Universities.
EuSpRIG 2009 Conference Co-Sponsors The following organizations are pleased to support the EuSpRIG 2009 Conference: Baker Tilly, Spreadsheet Engineering Ltd, AuditNet, Systems Modelling, Information Systems Audit and Control Association — Northern Chapter, University of Wales Institute Cardiff, University of Greenwich and STEF ENS Cachan. There is an opportunity available for a main conference sponsor.
Grenville Croll, EuSpRIG Chair, Spreadsheet Engineering Ltd, +44 (0) 7935
323499.
Pat Cleary, EuSpRIG Secretary, UWIC, Cardiff, +44 (0)2920 416070.