It’s About What Must Exist Together for Enterprise Work to Happen
By Hiran de Silva
A recurring confusion in Excel and analytics discussions is the tendency to label almost any powerful tool as “enterprise-ready,” simply because it is widely deployed or technically capable.
A recent example came from Richard Nero, who argued:
“You cannot say Power Query is obsolete in enterprise work. Power Query sits in Excel, Excel Online, Power BI, Fabric, Power Automate and probably elsewhere. Any of those tools is capable of building an enterprise model, report or process.”
This statement sounds reasonable.
It is also the root of the misunderstanding.
The problem is not Power Query.
The problem is how enterprise architecture is being defined.
A Working Definition: What Enterprise Architecture Actually Means
Enterprise architecture is not defined by:
- The number of users
- The popularity of a tool
- Whether the tool exists in multiple products
- Whether impressive outputs can be demonstrated
Enterprise architecture is defined by whether the following five properties exist together, by design:
- Scale
The system must operate across hundreds or thousands of entities (people, locations, accounts, processes) without structural change. - Reach
Participants must be able to work wherever they are—geographically, organisationally, and temporally—without local copies becoming “the system.” - Collaboration
Multiple participants must be able to work at the same time, on the same logical process, without overwriting or sequencing each other. - Consolidation
Aggregation must be native and automatic, not achieved by running a job, refreshing a model, or stitching files together. - Connected Processes
Outputs from one activity must become live inputs to another—budgets feeding forecasts, forecasts feeding management accounts, accounts feeding review—without export/import hand-offs.
Enterprise work only exists when all five are present simultaneously.
Remove any one of them, and you are no longer doing enterprise work—you are doing individual productivity at scale.
Why Tool Reach Is Not Enterprise Architecture
Power Query’s defenders often point out that it appears in:
- Excel Desktop
- Excel Online
- Power BI
- Fabric
- Power Automate
This is true—and irrelevant.
A tool’s distribution does not determine the architecture of the workflows built with it.
Power Query’s design goal is explicit and narrow:
Extract, Transform, Load data into a model.
That is not a flaw.
It is exactly what Power Query does very well.
But architecturally, it is a pull-based, batch-oriented, localised operation:
- Data is pulled into a container
- The container becomes the working boundary
- Refresh becomes an event
- Logic lives inside the artefact
This is the opposite of a distributed enterprise workflow.
An enterprise system does not ask:
“Who needs to refresh?”
It ensures:
“The system is always current.”
The Critical Distinction: Demonstrations vs Systems
This is where social media and training culture quietly distort the conversation.
Most demonstrations show:
- One person
- One workbook
- One dataset
- One transformation
- One impressive result
That is personal productivity, even when the dataset is large and the logic is clever.
Enterprise architecture starts where demonstrations stop:
- Many people
- Many simultaneous contributors
- Shared authoritative data
- Separation of data, logic, and presentation
- Continuous consolidation without orchestration
You cannot demonstrate this meaningfully in a five-minute clip—because its power lies in what no one has to do anymore.
Excel Already Has Enterprise Architecture — Quietly
Here is the uncomfortable truth:
Excel already contains the primitives needed for true enterprise architecture:
- Client–server connectivity
- Relational data models outside the workbook
- Centralised data ownership
- Distributed client interaction
- Live consolidation without refresh rituals
This architecture has existed for decades.
It is simply:
- Not fashionable
- Not visually exciting
- Not algorithmically “clever”
- Not rewarded by engagement metrics
So it is rarely taught.
Instead, Excel is framed as a personal tool that must be rescued by platforms, layers, and replacements—despite already being capable of operating as a thin client in a proper enterprise design.
Why This Matters
When enterprise architecture is misdefined:
- Organisations buy systems to solve problems they already solved
- Excel is blamed for architectures it was never used to implement
- “Modern” becomes synonymous with “batch-driven”
- Distributed work is replaced with orchestration theatre
Most importantly, professionals are trained to optimise tools, not systems.
They learn how to transform data beautifully—
but not how to design workflows that remove the need for transformation altogether.
A Simpler, Sharper Test
If you want to know whether something is enterprise architecture, ask one question:
Can the organisation keep working while nobody presses Refresh?
If the answer is no, you are not looking at enterprise architecture—
no matter how many platforms the tool appears in.
Final Thought
Power Query is not obsolete.
It is simply not the organising principle of enterprise work.
Enterprise architecture is not about where a tool exists.
It is about what must exist together for work to scale without coordination.
And that distinction—quiet, structural, and rarely demonstrated—is the one most discussions keep missing.
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