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A colleague of mine is in the process of evaluating reporting tools. She mentioned she was having difficulty with a demo because, as she colorfully put it, the addresses stored in our database were "salmagundi." In other words, our data is a real mess. "But I thought you were talking about a reporting tool," another colleague piped up. "That's mail merge, not reporting." And it got me thinking. What the heck IS a reporting tool? It's no wonder there's confusion, both in our company and throughout our industry, about what reporting software works best. We don't even agree on what reporting is. That makes it awfully hard to figure out which reporting solutions will meet our goals. So let me try to sum up my thoughts on reporting, with the goal of using it as a guide for how to (eventually) evaluate reporting software. Thought #1: If you've got data, you need reporting. It doesn't matter what the data is or why you want it. In the most basic terms, reporting has to do with getting that data in a form that's easy to understand, digest, and take action upon. No one wants to wade through records stored in databases, looking for relevant facts and figures. Thought #2: IT and non-IT have radically different views on what reporting is. Surprise, surprise - as if the tech gang and the non-geeks agree on anything. (And even if they do it's hard to tell, because the two groups don't even speak the same language!) The IT group tends to look at reporting as a process of getting data out of a data source and into a report, while the business group tends to look at reporting as a process of gathering information and turning it into knowledge. IT sees the trees, and non-IT sees the forest. This is a broad oversimplification, of course, but you get my point. Thought #3: To you reporting is document generation; to me it's business intelligence. And we're both right. If you go back to the definition of what reporting is, you see that reporting covers a myriad of tasks. Reporting can be document generation - taking a template and automatically generating customized documents. It can be business intelligence - data that is analyzed for the purpose of cutting costs, increasing sales or otherwise making sure a business runs as profitably as possible. It can also be mail merge, traditional reporting, and many other things. Thought #4: Reporting has many definitions, and so does a "report." If you think of a report as a template with data inserted into it, you'll probably quickly come to the conclusion - as I did - that a report can be lots of things. Invoices. Bank statements. Insurance policies. Sales charts. Business cards. Etc. So the next time I'm with colleagues and this topic comes up, maybe I'll be able to shed a little light. Reporting may not be fodder for an earth-shaking philosophical discussion, but it could shake up the way a company does business.
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Having excellent reporting software is something Scott Duglase can’t do without. Being in sales and marketing for a small sports agency, he manages the offices quarterly reports. He knows that having the right reporting solutions is key to producing timely and effective business reports. Without solid reporting tools, he wouldn’t be able to play in the competitive arena of sports marketing.
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