Analytical Diaries

Have you ever faced a reporting inventory of over 2500 reports? And alongside several stakeholders with slightly opposing views:

“That’s a wealth on information on which we act and steer and decide. We’ll need every single one of these reports”,
says Mr. Fact Junky

“Every business can be run on 3 max 8 reports, no matterwhich size, industry or geography”,
says Mr. Lean’nMean

And I guess the truth lies somewhere in between those two extremist views. Here’s how we have approached the reporting dragon in the past. Maybe you can add & share your experiences:

1. Introduce the target grail – There is no holy grail of reporting tools and strategy. Yet when listening to the different departments and vendors you feel like amidst the crusades – religiously fought over existing data marts and new pet projects. Usually to focus a divers and heterogeneous group of BI users on a common strategy & direction you’ll have to transport the benefits of standardization and centralization of data. Paint a picture where the data is common and normalized but the freedom of creating new and independent reports, analysis and dashboards remains.
2. Find a fast success story – your most common reaction will be “yeah, right, you’re thest that tries…”. If you have a good understanding of the dragon’s weak points you can tackle a small but important pain point. For example don’t try to solve all cost reports at once, maybe just start with headcount.
3. Build your round table – be aware that you will not slay that dragon one handed, you’ll need to build your host of supporters. Sponsors usually are a good place to start and usually they are more convinced if you can tell them about ways to increase revenues rather than only save cost.
4. Offer services for the lazy & creatives – with BI there is no size fits all, but two usually do surprisingly often. Offer a full service, highly customized and tailor-made service from data integration to report creation full through to the editorial commenting process. As a second option offer a DIY self-service infrastructure. You’ll be surprised how much of your BI center’s workload will fall away, when your tech and data savvy users start to lend a hand. Last and optionally it’s a good idea to offer an ad hoc analysis team to generate fast answers to the questions of stakeholders that cannot do it themselves and don’t need the fancies of a full report or dashboard.
5. Slay the dragon – Turn them off – regularly that last and obvious step is ignored or disregarded. Once you have tuned your user community to the target state of mind they will accept and welcome if you replace their former partial data marts & manual reporting processes and guide them toward the common future.

Sounds too easy and straight for you? I agree that for large organizations we’re usually talking a 2 to 3 year process and not a single big six month project. But once embarked on a common trail it’s amazing how much momentum your own report crusade can develop.
Start to raise your banners.