Rather than lacking reports most organizations have too many reports from too many different systems.
These reports have to be manually reviewed in order to extract only the information of interest. Multiple reports have to be
summarized in order to get the right level of information as shown in the illustration to the right.
Everyone senses that a few
of the right reports are the way to go. Our clients say that the right reports have the following attributes:
- They provide integrated information across systems so that the performance of a process can be measured rather than just bits and pieces.
(e.g. How many marketing leads turn into revenue?)
- The right level of information is delivered so that the recipient can move directly to action. If I am the National Sales Manager I need a broader picture of sales
than that of the assigned sales rep for Portland, Oregon.
- The report needs to deliver the information within a timeframe that is appropriate to the resulting decision. Not being able to see that
sales are off forecast till a week into the following month doesn't help.
- The data has been extended and enhanced to meet the unique strategy of the organization. For example - one of our retail clients has a strategy
focused around high levels of customer service. They developed a data gathering capability above and beyond their point of sale
system in order to measure customer service levels. It was critical to their strategy to be able to integrate this measurement of customer
service with their sales information to assess the impact of their unique high customer service strategy on sales volumes and profitability.
The keys to success in developing a strong reporting capability for an organization are:
- Definition Focus on the definition of the reports. We recommend walking through a checklist document of questions such as the example
below. The key is to understand who will use the report and how they will
use it - what actions will they take? Try not to over-design the presentation of the report too early. Let the report designer come
up with a good way to communicate the information once they understand who will use it and what they will do with it.
- Data First Get the data right before getting worried about presentation. This has two aspects. Think about adding a small data mart to your reporting
environment if you don't already have one. Click here for reasons why you might consider a data mart.
The second aspect is to construct the report itself by focusing first on simple lists of data. Then
once you are confident in the data you can dive into presentation.
- Foundation Provide all of the infrastructure before turning report developers loose. Set up standard ways of controlling access to reports and information
and auditing their usage. Provide report templates that include standard headers and footers with report names, data freshness dates, confidentiality
notices and any other standard elements. Both IBM Cognos and Microsoft Reporting Services make this easy to do. This will make report developers more
efficient by not requiring them each to deliver these capabilities independently.