I love technology and I'm inherently lazy, so I love it when technology can do the work for me. But sometimes, there is no technology to do the task at hand, or the technology is too expensive or "too big" for the job.

For example, I was working with a client recently on managing their sponsors, advertisers, and exhibitors. This organization provides a lot of benefits to their big sponsors over the course of the year, and they need a way to track what has been promised and delivered to their sponsors. They are currently doing this via spreadsheets.

But here's the rub. While there are lots of details for each of the sponsors they are working with, they are working with fewer than 30 organizations in total. So while there are certainly data management systems that could help manage all of this, those systems are going to be relatively expensive. And they are going to require a lot of time to implement and use. And they make actually be more difficult to use than a simple spreadsheet.

So in the end, a decision has to be made: Does moving to a new system, with all its inherent costs, provide enough additional benefit to justify the effort required, both short-term and ongoing? Or as some software developers like to say: "Is the juice worth the squeeze?"

Sometimes, because of the amount of data we're managing, or the uniqueness of the data itself, using simple systems like spreadsheets might be the only viable option. And we just need to get comfortable with that.