Late last week I had lunch with Nenshad Bardoliwalla, an ex-VP from SAP’s Business Intelligence group. He has written a great book on Corporate Performance Management . He said (and I paraphrase)” that users don’t really know what to look for in a report and that information is useless without context. So even if you gave all the required reports to a customer they wouldn’t know all the right things to look for.” His point was that the BI industry needs much more than reports. Customers need guidance on what to look for.
After being in countless sales and service implementation cycles, I had to agree and disagree. I would say some companies do know what to look for and some don’t. Some companies are in industries where having certain reports to run certain operations is imperative. If you are in Retail, you must know how much you sold of what. If you are a growing small company, you may or may not. I once worked with a client (a VP of Sales) who wanted to see the change in sales pipeline week over week. As soon as the report was delivered, he stared at it, he mulled, he rubbed his chin and asked – “But which deals came in and which deals got pushed out, this week”. This lead to a discussion, which lead to 3 other reports. I have also witnessed situations where a senior executive who has worked in a larger company and knows how to analytically run the operation, joins a smaller company and brings the analytic discipline. They know how to work top-down and zoom in on the 10-15 KPIs for the department or the company to focus on. I have seen B2C companies like eBay, Schwab, Google etc. have job postings that show that they hire people who will figure out which metrics to focus on.
What do you think? Is reporting overrated? Is this a technology problem or do companies need to hire more people that are analytically competent? Or both? How would you rate your company’s or department’s ability to know which metrics or KPIs to analyze?
Ajay,
Thanks for posting an interesting question. I think reporting is only overrated in so much as it becomes just a tool for looking good. What I mean is, unless it’s actionable or a real driver in strategics/tactical decisions, it’s just another pretty picture. On the guidance part, I believe this is often peer-driven. As such, it’s important to have a reporting tool that allows this interaction (and feeds it). This goes to the learning process which I believe it crucial in this business. Finally, the tool should allow “train of thought” user experience because this is often how winning/actionable reports and other dashboards get created.
Just my 2 cents
Jerome.
Well I think reporting is WAY overrated. And I think the fact that too many BI products have been sucked into the vortex of reporting is limiting their effectiveness. As I said in a post (http://jtonedm.com/2009/02/11/to-hell-with-business-intelligence-try-decision-management/) I think companies must focus on decisions and on how to support and manage those decisions and not on reporting if they are to succeed.
James
Thanks for your post and a very passionate blog post reference. I also agree that too many BI products have been sucked into just reporting.
One of the patterns that we see in our prospect base is that many of our customers – small companies ($20MM) and departments of large companies, is that business managers struggle to get basic insight into their business operations. Simple questions like “How did my pipeline change or which orders missed delivery dates etc.” etc. are not being answered. These business managers have to take time out of their jobs and spend time on dealing with getting data out of source systems, and combining data in excel. As a first step they need simple automation to get the basic metrics. Once they are comfortable with this they ask for more. David Vonk, our SVP of Sales and Service was at a conference responding to someone from Gartner on a similar note and he talked about a small customer of ours who went from going live to adding a new data source in 90 days. This does not happen with traditional BI tools because the technologies are expensive and complex and take months to get up and running.
Some of our customers have been asking us to get into more decision management both from a consulting and a product standpoint. They have achieved comfort and maturity with plain reporting and are ready for the next step. But there are a lot more users out there that are starved of basic reporting.
In summary, I think both reporting and decision management has their need and place and it all depends on the comfort, maturity and familiarity with BI.
Jerome
Thanks for your response. Your ideas like “train of thought” analysis are very much appreciated. What do you think about what tools companies need depending on their maturity levels with BI, business process and data quality. We see that mature companies who have conquered reporting are ready to move on and get more strategic value and others that struggle with expensive tools or Excel get stuck with trying to get basic visibility in their operations.
Hi Ajay,
It’s great to see the blog post and more important the reactions of the venerable members of our extended community. I have posted my own addition to the original post here:
http://bardoli.blogspot.com/2009/10/pivotlink-blog-is-reporting-overrated.html
Best Regards,
Nenshad