The Way To A Business’s Heart Is Through Its Reporting
How Cooking Up Some Great Reporting Can Help You Influence
Reporting is a much overlooked and underappreciated component of the analytic and decision-making infrastructure. It is often relegated to junior employees and even interns. Despite that, it remains the most powerful point of leverage in any organization with more than a single decision-maker. This assumes the organization has reporting.
Today most organizations have a distributed model for decision-making. We are all knowledge workers, now. Most organizations also have some level of reporting. The percentage still using excel files in share folders remains disheartening, but faster, cheaper, and easier Business Intelligence software is slowly winning out.
Reporting matters. Far more than most organizations grasp. Reporting is the heart of your business. It is that core function that pumps information to your organization. It creates focus and it fuels culture. Yet, it is routinely overlooked, under resourced, and led by someone best described as a convenient order taker. Sorry — but the incompetence of far too many business intelligence leaders is far from speculative.
This presents a golden opportunity (sales team look here!)
If I had a basis point of even the fractional budgets of every business intelligence platform where I heard “that isn’t in the reports, yet”, I’d make the Forbes list. But this is a huge opportunity… for lots of people.
If you are a vendor, a salesman, a developer, or an analyst — you want to be in the reporting. Your product, your service, your initiative needs to produce regular reporting. Assuming even modest success in its overall purpose, this simple step will assure your integration into the core and heart of any business.
So why is reporting so often overlooked or an afterthought of so many efforts?
I could rant on about the causal forces at work here, but this article is intended to be short. Many organizations are predicated on a total lack of accountability… no seriously. If you track it, you will be held accountable. So if you plan to suck… move on. If you plan to win however
— Don’t question it. Exploit it.
This is your classic inefficiency in the system. The most practical question then is —
How do I take advantage of this?
The simplest answer is to find yourself a data integration and reporting partner. The harder answer is to find an efficient and effective one. There are a few of us out here.
The hardest answer is to internally resource someone. It will be slow, expensive, and temporary — this is a fractional labor model if there ever was one. Just remember this goes beyond a few years of Tableau experience. You want someone talking to the finance team, understanding existing KPI, and optimizing segmentation, frequency, and scale to reflect the needs of the business. Simple right?
What was the benefit again?
Right — never end with the work. If your product, service, or initiative has reporting integrated into the business (and is not a failure), it is going to suddenly become very endearing to the decision-makers of the company. CEO, CFO, and COO love things they can see, measure, and therefore trust.
Resources and budgets flow to these same qualities. Ask any CFO — would you rather invest a dime in a transparent, tracked, and trustworthy initiative with a smaller (but postive) ROI or that thing marketing swears will double the business? Desperate companies will disappoint… move on. But most COs are drawn to certainty.
Finally, reporting is advertising. For all you sales-minded readers, reporting is a lingering business card and CV. It is a sales brochure of return, competence, and trust. If you can also score a little mark-up on the integration work? All the better!
