Reporting: The Most Boring, Important Thing in Analytics

Dresner Advisory Services’ report about self-service business intelligence uncovered a surprising result. Among all the technologies and initiatives that respondents consider important, the item that topped the list was reporting.

Let’s zoom in a bit to make that easier to read. Yep, Reporting is the most important strategic initiative to businesses in their use of data. (Shout out to #12 Data Storytelling!)

Let that sink in. Among all the hot analytics initiatives to choose from (big data, IoT, NLP, data storytelling, cognitive BI, GDPR), plain old, boring reporting is what is considered the most important strategic initiative. In fact, the top of the list is all meat-and-potatoes data needs — reporting, dashboards, data integration, data warehousing (sorry, not data lakes), and data prep.

But seriously, reporting? That has to be the most boring term in all of analytics. How can you not think of "TPS Reports"?

It makes me wonder: Is reporting the dark matter of analytics? It is everywhere, holding the data universe together, yet it manages to elude our attention and affection.

If I swap in the word “reports” to this dark matter article, the parallels are eerie.

Reporting isn't eluding everyone's attention (that’s obvious from the survey). But it does seem to elude the attention of analytics vendors who want to build lakes, predict outcomes, learn deeply, and tell stories. We’re guilty of gravitating to concepts that seem to have more curb appeal.

In the midst of all that possibility, business must go on with:
• Marketing reports explaining campaign performance
• HR survey reports
• Reporting to shareholders or investors
• Sales performance reports
• Product engagement reports

• Project impact reports.

Reporting can be for internal audiences. Reporting is also common for customers or clients. It can be simple (e.g. in an email update) or in-depth (e.g. as an interactive, exploratory website).

Your report should always have a clear purpose, convey a message, and encourage action.

If you are sitting in the position of an IT leader, you are begging for reporting to be less painful. You want to reduce the backlog of reports that “need” to be produced each month. You want to reduce the back-and-forth of requirements from business users.

It might be time that we acknowledge the centrality of reporting in our universe. When we do, we’ll start to focus on making reporting better.