Excel Was Never Meant to Stand Trial for DX

— What the “Bucket Brigade” Story from Saitama Prefectural Government Doesn’t Tell Us

In June 2026, the Saitama Prefectural Government officially published a link on its DX portal website to a Yahoo! Japan news article.

Saitama Prefecture is located immediately north of Tokyo, with a population of approximately 7.3 million, and is one of the major prefectures in the Greater Tokyo metropolitan area. Its prefectural government — a public institution employing some 13,000 staff — is the subject of this article.

The headline read: “200+ Departments Trapped in an ‘Excel Bucket Brigade’ — How Did Saitama Prefectural Government Solve It?”

The tool chosen as the “solution” was kintone, developed by Cybozu Inc. kintone is sometimes positioned in the market as an “Excel replacement,” but it is not, in any essential sense, a replacement for Excel. kintone is a server-based database software; it is fundamentally different from a spreadsheet. This distinction matters deeply to the problems discussed below.

The prefecture’s official website stated: “This article introduces the challenges of inefficiency caused by information sharing via email and Excel in cross-departmental inquiry-response workflows, and how the no-code tool ‘kintone’ was adopted to address them.”

Proudly. Without critical examination.

Reading this, I found myself asking one question: Was Excel ever truly the villain here?

What Is Excel, Really?

The essence of Excel is to summarize and outline raw data while keeping the raw data intact.

In other words, Excel should function as a query tool. Data lives elsewhere. Excel submits queries to that data, temporarily visualizes the results, and once the deliverable — a Word report, a PDF expense statement, a PowerPoint slide deck — is complete, the Excel file should be discarded.

There is a second point. Excel was designed as a tool for one person to think with. It is a personal cognitive workspace.

From these two properties, one conclusion follows: Excel was never designed for sharing.

What Was Actually Wrong with the Bucket Brigade?

Let us be precise about what was happening at Saitama Prefectural Government.

More than 200 departments were exchanging Excel files by email. Each person in the chain would enter their portion of data and forward it to the next. This is what was called the “bucket brigade.”

So what was the problem?

As a single fact travels through the chain, layers of interpretation and modification accumulate at each stop. And those modifications leave no trace. No one knows who changed which number, when, or why.

More critically: a commit of raw data was being performed at every step in the chain.

In data management, a “commit” is the act of declaring “this state is correct” and locking it in. Commit authority should be granted to a limited number of designated points, and commits must carry both judgment and accountability.

In the bucket brigade, more than 200 staff members were each performing their own commit. A chain of commits. And since everyone believed they were “doing it properly,” no one felt responsible. There was no malice — which made it worse.

The design principle that should have governed this — raw data managed in one place, analysis performed by whoever needs it from whatever angle they need — never existed in the first place.

How Did Excel End Up Being Used This Way?

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Japan’s public sector was swept up in the rhetoric of the “IT Revolution.”

And the IT Revolution pointed at Excel.

Digitalization arrived in Japan as “use Microsoft Office,” and Excel was thereby certified as the correct answer. The question that should have come first — “what are we digitizing for?” — was replaced by a question of proficiency: “can you use Excel and Word?”

This was not unique to Saitama. Many Japanese local governments adopted Excel into their workflows without examination. They received what was pointed at without asking why.

Thirty years passed.

A Note on the Division of Tools

It is worth pausing to clarify what different tools are actually for.

• CRM, POS systems, and business applications: UI and data are integrated; these tools support the business process itself
• RDB (Relational Database): a data-only engine for storing information
• Excel: temporarily aggregates and visualizes given data; to be discarded once the deliverable is complete

The reason Excel came to be used as a catch-all was straightforward: no budget or authority to implement CRM, no personnel capable of managing an RDB, but Excel was already there.

It filled a vacuum.

And “it was unavoidable” quietly became “it is correct.” That substitution is where the problem began.

DX Made Excel the Villain

Then came the 2020s, and DX pointed at Excel. This time, as a villain.

The phrase “Excel exodus” — datsu Excel in Japanese — spread widely. Overseas, warnings about Excel’s risks are not new. Researchers associated with EuSpRIG (European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group) and others have raised concerns for years. But those concerns were always about rejecting misuse — rejecting the structures that make errors likely. They were never a rejection of Excel itself.

What happened in Japan was something different.

Looking at the Saitama case, the core problem was that Excel was used as a mere data container to be passed around, without ever employing its computational capabilities — no formulas, no structured analysis. Excel was systematically misused. And yet the conclusion reached was: “stop using Excel.”

Rather than rejecting the misuse, Excel itself was rejected.

DX should target business processes. Replacing a tool is not DX. But every story of transformation needs a symbol of the old order, and Excel was cast in that role — despite never having been a legitimate target for DX in the first place.

The real problem lay in information design: the conflation of raw data and committed data, the diffusion of commit authority, the chain of untraced modifications. These are not tool problems. They are organizational information design problems. Replacing Excel with kintone may simply mean the chain of modifications now happens in real time.

The Problem of the Absent Examination

Looking at this sequence of events, one thing stands out: there was no examination.

The difficulties were real. The phenomenon was genuine. But the identification of cause was never verified. Why did the inefficiency arise? That question was never asked. In its absence, a narrative formed: Excel was the cause, kintone was the solution.

When the identification of cause is wrong, the solution will be wrong. Symptoms may ease temporarily, but if the cause remains, the problem will return in another form.

This might fairly be called the structure of pseudoscience.

What makes it particularly troubling is that it was published in good faith, with pride, without doubt, as an official communication. It circulates as a success story, spreading a flawed causal narrative.

Tracing the path of this news: from a Cybozu press release, to an ITmedia article, to syndication on Yahoo! Japan News, to an official link posted on Saitama Prefecture’s DX portal — not once did critical examination enter the chain. Nothing improper happened at any individual step. Yet the result was that a press release became the official position of a prefectural government.

The Cost of Adoption Without Questions

A quiet question, to close.

For thirty years, inefficiency went unrecognized as inefficiency, and operations continued — unexamined, on taxpayer money. Personnel costs, licensing costs, the accumulated hours consumed by the bucket brigade — all of it, public funds. The kintone adoption, too. The licenses for all 13,000 staff. Also public funds.

No one has calculated the cost of adoption without questions.

This is not an indictment of Saitama Prefectural Government. But as long as the cycle continues — the IT Revolution points at Excel, DX makes Excel the villain, the next tool is pointed at — the cost of adoption without questions will always be paid by the public.

This is not a problem of tools. It is a problem of thinking.

References

Saitama Prefecture DX Portal (official page linking to the news coverage): https://www.pref.saitama.lg.jp/dx-portal/info/news2026060301.html

Yahoo! Japan News (article introducing the case): https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/60da8062de91e01379d794dd9e7520dcd0677e61

ITmedia Enterprise (original source article): https://www.itmedia.co.jp/enterprise/articles/2605/26/news044.html