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

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.

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.

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.