Maximizing Your Return from Reporting, Part 2: Increasing Value

To get the biggest bang for your reporting dollar, your organization’s reports need to maximize the value you get for the time you invest. Here are five tips (and a bonus one) to achieve that.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, reporting isn’t free. Since reporting requires you to spend money up front to get results later, reporting is best thought of as an investment. And, like any other investment, you want to make sure that you get the maximum return of your investment in reporting. In that earlier post, I talked about managing reporting costs as one way to maximize your return

And while there’s nothing wrong with reducing costs, this post looks at the real payoff: Getting more value from the reports that your Line-Of-Business (LOB) staff use. That value can come from up to three areas:

• Improving decision making by your LOB staff
• Driving innovation within your organization by revealing both new opportunities and existing gaps
• Shaping long-term strategy by showing your existing reality and extrapolating into your future

There are, at least, five ways that you can increase the value from your reports.

1. Improving Reporting Logistics

First, if you haven’t already done so, move to end-user reporting. And, yes, that’s a word-for-word quote from my previous blog post on reducing costs. But, while reducing costs, end-user reporting also increases value. No one knows what your LOB staffs needs better than they do—giving them the tools and getting out of their way is your first, best choice in generating value.

2. Getting Your LOB Staff the Data They Need

Second: Provide your LOB staff with simple and easy access to the data that they need to create their reports. Yes, you need to keep data secure and private, but your reporting tool should take care of that by cascading data protections from report data sources down to whoever’s currently reading the report. Report developers should be able to easily get to the data they want to include in their report and be confident the report will shape the data appropriately for the report reader.

3. Extending Report’s Reach

Third: Provide some direction to your report creators on how to create a report that’s useful to more than just the report creator. You can almost certainly see the result of report creators only considering themselves in your organization: If you look in your organization’s report repository, you’ll probably find multiple reports that are, effectively, duplicates of each other. Those duplicates of existing reports are adding no value and taking time away from creating new, useful reports.

That report duplication happens for two reasons: One reason is that your LOB staff couldn’t find a report they needed (even though that report existed) and so they created, essentially, a new version of that report. Standards and best practices around organizing your report repository and naming reports will fix that.

But the other reason for duplicate reports is that each report creator is generating a report that only they understand. Report creators that focus exclusively on their needs are perfectly capable of creating reports that are unusable even to other LOB staff that care about the report’s information.

This can mean, for example, that your organization has a separate sales report for every product line when a single report that allows a product manager to select the product line to be displayed would do the job. That single report not only serves a wider audience of all product managers—as that report evolves, the benefits of enhancing the report are delivered to everyone, rather than just to one product manager. Having a single report that addresses common concerns also enables LOB staff to focus on creating reports that meet needs unique to their area.

Broadening the reach of your reports is an area where a small investment in training and direction can have a big payoff. You want to have your LOB report creators think about three things beyond their own needs when creating a report:

1. Audience: Who could use this report?
2. Scenario: What problem does this report address?
3. Purpose: What kinds of solutions does this report support—e.g., Increasing revenue? Identifying opportunities? Flagging anomalies?

Having your report creators think about more than just their needs results in reports that are useful to the organization as a whole.

For example, someone who’s familiar with the data presented in a descriptive report (which just lists data) might be able to draw conclusions and make good decisions based on that report: The description of the data is enough for that user to do an analysis in their head and make a decision. However, if that report included some aggregate data and a graph that supported that analysis, that descriptive report turns into an analytical report that allows a wider audience to understand what’s going on and also make better decisions.

4. Managing Report Data and Its Structure

Fourth: Report creators need to consider what datasets their reports will use and select datasets that the report’s audience have confidence in.

That may sound odd, but think of the commercials for headache medicine you’ve seen: Some commercials have ordinary people, just like you, talking about how great a particular product is. Another set of commercials have experts recommending a particular product based on the product’s effectiveness. A third set of commercials have statistics and graphs that demonstrate how well a product works, based on laboratory tests. The reason there’s a variety of commercials is because different people find different kinds of data compelling: some prefer personal testimony, some value experts and others want data.

This is equally true in your organization—when creating a report, report creators need to pick the data that the report’s audience will believe in.

5. Structuring Reports

Fifth: Report creators need to consider the structure of their report so that the report supports its audience, scenario and purpose.

For example, in any report, report creators need consider what aggregate values will help the audience understand the problem and help the audience make a decision: Should the report have totals? Would averages make more sense? Does the audience understand standard deviations and, if so, should they be used? To put it more bluntly: Does this report really need a total at the bottom of every column that has numbers in it?

Alternatively, does the report need the detail information at all—do the aggregates tell the story the audience needs? Or should the report hide the detail most of the time, show just the aggregates and reveal the detail only when the user requests it? In that case, what aggregate values will let the reader spot the areas where they will want to drill down into the detail? The goal is to provide the report’s audience everything they need to make a decision and nothing else (including material that doesn’t support the audience’s purpose in this scenario is just “report clutter”).

In a graphic, creators need to consider the story the graphic tells to reach a wider audience than just themselves. For charts, a column chart is great for comparing values by allowing audience members to compare the height of the various columns. On the other hand, if the report needs to show the magnitude of a change (especially, change over time), a line graph shows both the difference between two numbers and, through the slope of its line, the magnitude of the change.

Hanging onto the Value

One last note: Never assume that a report is finished. The world is changing as you read this, and your reporting needs are changing with that. A report that was valuable yesterday may not be today.

To hang onto your reports’ value, solicit feedback on how valuable your organization’s reports are to your LOB staff. That feedback will not only identify reports that could be enhanced to serve a larger audience (or support better decision making around a problem) but will also identify gaps in your reporting that need to be filled.

In the end, the real payoff in reporting comes from producing increasingly more valuable reports that support better decision making, drive innovation and identify changes in an increasingly agile world. Your reports can give you all those things, which makes them a very valuable asset to your organization.