A post over on the Walker Information Blog – Reports that prompt action made me think about the number of useless reports I see. Their focus was on voice of the customer or other customer information reports but it made me think more generally about reports. How many reports do business people in your organization get every day? How many of them actually prompt an action?
If they don’t prompt an action, a change in behavior, what is the point of the report?
If they do, could you do something more useful? Could you recommend a suitable action or take the action automatically and just tell them what you did? Would a focused analytic give them more actionable information than a report? Could you apply their rules to your data and generate something more focused? Instead, for instance, of giving them a report of product sales which might prompt them to promote products moving slowly perhaps you could use analytics to figure out which products were moving slowly and tell them just about that, perhaps with suggested promotional rules based on what has worked in the past (derived by another analytic)?
Reports may be a mainstay of information systems but decision management can often create more value from the same data. Act don’t report.
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