Lab tests and diagnostics, medical staff shifts, surgery schedule, patient history - all this data is now hosted, for the most part, in a digital environment. Just imagine what someone could do if he or she had access to all that information.

Aligning IT and business units sounds fantastic in theory. But when the rubber meets the road, IT leaders face unique challenges as they strive to engage and collaborate with business-side colleagues.

Enterprise spreadsheets are designed to provide the best of both worlds in that they offer the ease of use and flexibility of desktop spreadsheets while overcoming their defects - chiefly inability to maintain data integrity, lack of referential integrity and dimensionality, absence of workflow and process controls, limited security and access controls as well as poor auditability. All of these issues can cause serious problems for business use.