I was recently working with a client who needed to do an assessment of all of the reports currently set up on their reporting infrastructure. After an exhaustive search, the company of roughly 800 employees discovered they have an average of 2.3 reports per employee. Yep….do the math. That’s over 1800 unique reports. Of course they don’t use them all on a consistent basis, but where did they all come from? My theory is that many corporations are simply addicted to reports.
Let’s look at this a bit more pragmatically. The reality is that many companies still view reports as the source of information that is necessary to answer their business questions. This has been especially true ever since Dionne Warwick sent the Psychic Friends Network into chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998. Now reports have certainly evolved from classic green-bar paper reports of the 70’s and 80’s to drill-down Microsoft SRS reports that are gaining in popularity every day. However, most reports offer essentially pre-defined flat aggregations of data in a form that will hopefully have the answer to whatever the question happens to be. Now…here is the kicker…what happens in companies where either the answer in the report, or the information intended to provide the answer, leads to another question? In many companies…you guessed it…it leads to another report! The cycle of addiction is started.
Now this vicious cycle of “report addiction” to answer more questions is often a function of the company culture that has likely evolved over the years. The business systems used by the company gather data and reports from those systems are the key to assembling the data into information. I guess this kind of makes IT seem like the “dealer” in an underworld of report addiction. Why not? There certainly is a sense of self-fulfilling job security if you are in IT writing reports and the rest of the business are a bunch of report “junkies”.
The key to breaking the cycle of report addiction is to establish a culture that embraces timely, self-directed analysis. As I described above, it is not uncommon for a report to spawn questions that require more reports. However, this often takes a while because it takes time to design and write new reports. Newer BI technology, particular in-memory analytics tools (like QlikView), make it possible for end users to not only look at information, but interact with the information, so they can truly analyze the information. The means users don’t just drill-down into more detailed information, but they can drill-across information, or even create new aggregations on-the-fly. The outcome is faster, better decisions and a reduction in what I call the “time to knowledge”. Extend the power of analysis out to select end users and start breaking the cycle of report addiction. The impact can be huge.
Until next time…Shawn