Back To Basics: The Business Requirement For Reporting

Corporate business intelligence is my bread and butter and I have just spent some time writing down some basic explanations for business managers that I want to share with you.

For many line managers, talk of analytics can often feel to them like a 'nice to have'. The following tries to explain the types of reporting they need and to do this within a very basic framework. The intention is to identify certain characteristics of their reporting (i.e. reporting) needs.

• Operational – At the lowest level, business operations use data that is: 
  
  • Very low grain (e.g. account level), little to no summaries or aggregates, not analysed
  • Narrow scope (i.e. a single function of the report, limited information)
  • Limited usage - perhaps a single user in the organisation that reviews each day/hour
  • Very source specific (i.e. no requirement for across source view) but often larger organisations need to merge data from multiple (but still specific) sources
  • No interactivity - just a simple plan text list of numbers and attributes
  • Capability to produce directly from source system with minimal impact on performance
  • Business Unit functional reporting to answer 'what's happening today' questions
  • Business critical - less than 1 day and increasingly needed in real-time.

• Management – information that is:
  
  • Used to assist management decision making over periods longer than a single day
  • Used for targeting, forecasting, trending or historical analysis (standard reporting, interactive, slice-and-dice analysis)
  • Hierarchical and summarised
  • Enterprise wide - multiple sources/dimensions view of data or widespread use across business units
  • Difficult to produce directly from a source (disparate data, no-history, high impact on performance)
  • Business Unit ad hoc reporting requirements to answer 'what if' questions
  • Regulatory reporting
  • Business critical if there is a 1-2 days outage.

• Strategic – supporting the ‘big’ questions:
  
  • Highly analytic using large data sets but presenting the analysis in a summarised form
  • Wide scope (i.e. new products and services, business lines)
  • Limited interactivity – but usually visualised
  • Business enterprise insight to answer big 'what happens when ...' questions
  • Business critical in the medium to long term.

Once a line manager 'gets' this stuff, we can then use the framework to better identify and organise their own business information requirements.

It's basic, but you have to get the basics right if you are going to be successful in the more advanced stuff.

 

Comments

[Watanabe]

c1lvaro, esta informacif3n no te la da adorwds. Adwords te proporciona estadedsticas de la keywords que tiene comprada. Si por ejemplo has comprado coche y alguien ha clickado tu anuncio buscando coche viejo , adorwds te da el dato de coche no el de coche viejo .Si es necesario o no, lo dictare1 como cada uno tenga sus campaf1as, no?Telendro, yo tambie9n lo veo evil por que pese a que la informacif3n te la proporciona analytics, tiene que ser a partir de una f1apa . Esta informacif3n debereda darla Google, ya sea por adorwds o por analytics.

[Jetjet]

Actually, I'm formerly with the La Crosse Tribune. I'm cnuterrly laid off from a local TV station, where I went after the Tribune.But I'm still happy to have The Wire DVDs, since its my favorite show.Current score: 0

[Jose]

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[Harsha]

Just about to roll into 24 hours which I haven't seen since we first started using them. They were a litlte slow when we started using the analytics in February, and this is what they came back with:- Why has data suddenly stopped appearing in my account?Due to occasional system maintenance, you may experience temporary delays or gaps in data. Please rest assured that none of your data has been lost and your data should be populated within 72 hours.72 hours would be a killer. I also think they went the wrong direction with the new beta. I hope they leave the older version running for a long time to come.

[Web Development Company India]

Construction company require the above, who prefer the operational and strategic management. These are of great help to me.

[Business Intelligence Solution]

I appreciate your business ideas and the requirement points. Building the business require the above point which prefer to Operational,Management and Strategic. These all points are really helpful to me.