Streamline Reporting

Service Delivery Series: Transformation Strategies in Isolation

What Your Team Can Be Doing While They Wait ...

3. Streamline Reporting

It has been a while. Seems as though it has not gotten any less 'crazy' I last visited this topic. We maintain that internal teams should still be making the best of any unexpected and unanticipated downtime -- particularly that brought on as a business consequence to the pandemic.

We maintain that internal teams should still be making the best of any unexpected and unanticipated downtime -- particularly that brought on as a business consequence to the pandemic.

This time we are going to give some thought about reporting. Have you turned non-essential reporting off within your organization?

Why is this important?

Running reporting jobs, crafting business summaries, dashboards, and emails that are not even getting opened is hardly helping anyone. How many of these reporting jobs get printed, delivered via intracompany mail, only to end up untouched in a tall stack of unopened mail -- or automatically moved by a rule to an Inbox Folder, marked 'read', and never opened?

No doubt, data is key to helping your business determine which projects are successful, which strategies might require more of a budget, and which tactics we need to leave behind. But those who thrive on data also know its one major downfall: it can take hours to collect and organize. Even if you have an analytics software that tracks traffic, engagement, ROI, and other KPIs, you'll likely still need to take time to organize these numbers, analyze them, and come up with an understandable way to report to your team or clients.

In the past companies tasked full-timers with reporting-related duties. And, although much of the data collection process has been automated by various analytics software -- teams are still losing countless hours on manual data reporting. While your customers refer to the reports as valuable, the process of pulling the data, analyzing it, and drafting the reports easily takes a large chunk of time and resource. Is that a value add to the organization? Furthermore -- this could be taking your team members away from tasks that could be more productive in the long run, such as brainstorming new ideas and strategies that could noticeably help your clients.

Follow the paradigm shift: The Fetch vs. Push Alternative

It's a hard Habit To Break. The mobile revolution has not just brought the internet to everyoFollow the paradigm shift: The Fetch vs. Push Alternativene, but it has also connected hardware that lets us do reporting online without the need to print and scan or print and type. We can easily add pictures and assign tasks within our corporate environment without any interruptions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making inroads into every imaginable product and service, including data analytics which spawned it. Vendors are now racing to implement AI capabilities, including natural language queries, automated insights, natural language generation, and intelligent data preparation.

The question should be how can AI reshape business intelligence (BI). Will AI eliminate the need for traditional reports and dashboards or will it enhance those delivery methods, making them more, rather than less, valuable? Will AI generate right answers in response to spoken or written queries and automatically unearth related drivers and dimensions? Or will it simply augment reports and dashboards with additional insights once users are ready for them?

Many companies have already migrated to platforms which allow for users to fetch data instead of having it pushed to them. Do the research. Gain efficiencies.

Discover your non-essential reporting?

... Keep making the most out of this terrible situation.