Reporting – The Underappreciated, But Extremely Crucial Piece of The Enterprise Analytics Puzzle

In a digital age, the ability of organizations to collect, process, and analyze data from a gamut of internal and external sources can have a huge role to play in their success and longevity. Analytics not only helps in unearthing insights; it also helps uncover trends and opportunities on a continuous basis.

However, as businesses collect more and more data, they find it difficult to review information and draw conclusions to drive their business forward. It also becomes hard for businesses to identify if the strategy is working in real-time. Without that, it’s impossible for them to identify if there’s a need for a course correction to be made, sometimes until it’s too late to do so. The key concern is how to acquire transparent visibility into what’s the outcomes of actions taken in response to defined strategies.

Today, successful analytics goes far beyond just collecting and processing data; it needs to be paired with powerful reporting capabilities, to be able to make critical data-driven, evidence-based decisions about ongoing improvements.

The reporting and analytics paradigm

Organizations that look to improve the performance of their business need to begin by collecting data from across every aspect of their organization. They need data that serves as touchpoints to show what happens or what conditions change in response to actions. However, the problem with this raw data is that it isn’t insightful on its own. It needs to be fed into reporting and analytics engines to be transformed from simple data into usable information.

When it comes to making accurate and timely business decisions, the terms reporting, and analytics are often used together – or even interchangeably. Although both may use the same data and have an equal role to play in improving an organization’s decision-making capability, each has its own identify and purpose.

Reporting helps organizations organize the large amounts of data that is collected into easy-to-understand graphs and charts that focus on results, even ongoing touchpoints, and milestones. Analytics, on the other hand, analyzes this data and draws out valuable insights on how businesses can improve their performance. Reporting is necessarily focused on what has already taken place in the past as it turns data into information. Analytics helps actually interpret data and could deliver insights about what has taken place in the past as well as predictive, about what is likely to happen. But taken together, reporting and analytics provide the recommendations businesses need to ultimately improve outcomes.

Why reporting is important

For insightful business decisions to be made, organizations need to have an updated and optimized reporting process in place. Reporting helps present data of results and outcomes to business owners and decision-makers in an easy-to-understand manner. Instead of using endless spreadsheets of numbers to present data, it makes use of modern templates and graphs specifically tailored to their business needs, empowering decision-makers to easily and quickly get a picture of what has occurred. Going forward, a robust reporting solution can help them automate and streamline the reporting process while providing a number of benefits such as:

• Streamlined communication between various departments and teams, allowing validated information to flow in an efficient and timely manner.
• Increased effectiveness of resources at every level, by providing them a clear view of the outcomes of their past actions.
• Increased accuracy and timeliness of decisions across planning, budgeting, and forecasting on an ongoing basis – paving the way for improved business outcomes.

The unmatched capabilities of reporting

Knowing what is happening across the organization as the people, tools, and processes interpret, implement, and innovate the strategic decisions provided to them is crucial for the business leadership to be able to stay in control of the execution and take ownership of the outcomes. Organizations that look to drive greater confidence in the outcomes emerging from data-driven decision-making need to embrace comprehensive reporting solutions.

Modern, AI-powered reporting engines like IBM Cognos Analytics deliver a range of modern innovations, allowing users to access features anytime and anywhere and receive reliable information in real-time. Using such tools, professional report authors and developers can build sophisticated, multiple-page, multiple-query reports covering key areas like invoices, financial statements, and periodic sales and inventory reports. They can:

• Connect to a variety of data sources, perform the required calculations, and use built-in AI recommendations to unearth actionable data points.
• Choose from different views such as page design, page preview, and page structure view to author reports.
• Use the report appearance and report data that is needed to design effective reports and obtain the right results.
• Prepare, analyze, and visualize data and uncover hidden trends, patterns, and relationships in data in real-time
• Deliver self-service capabilities across data preparation, data discovery, and visualizations to enable confident decision-making by the entire business leadership.
• Create dynamic reports and dashboards to visualize key business metrics and dig deeper through drill-downs, drill-ups, and drill-throughs.
• Access dashboards and reports and receive alerts on relevant data from mobile phones.

In today’s increasingly global and competitive marketplace, it is no secret that organizations need useful information at their fingertips to make key business decisions. It’s also clear that they need to know at all times if they are progressing in the right direction and if the business strategies under implementation are likely to deliver the desired outcome. It’s in this context that reporting, although often underappreciated, becomes an extremely crucial piece of the enterprise analytics puzzle. Reporting fundamentally changes how actions are reviewed and decisions analyzed. Using reporting, organizations can enhance their effectiveness, improve communication and collaboration, and increase the accuracy and timeliness of decisions. 

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