Internal reporting trap

Internal reporting might be nightmare for producers and for consumers. For producers during time burden can become too heavy due to permanent change and enlarge of scope of internal reports. Yes, demands for information are not smaller and simplier during time but tend to grow exponencially in quantity and complexity.

How usually internal reporting starts… “please prepare for me couple of KPI’s weekly on one page”. Soon as organisation and business change demand might look like… “please just add several more KPI’s and some sales channels”

…. “Can you also add different customer segments?” 

…”we need parallel groupings KPIs for our products”

…and so on … and so on

After a while it is not only several KPIs to be monitored and prepared but hundreds and thousands.

“Lucky” organisational unit who is owner of internal reporting soon will face all types of cuckoos egs. Not only management will demand more and more KPIs but also small administrators will demand implementation of their KPIs into internal official reporting. Intention of small administrators is “reasonable”, they want to deliver their job to somebody else and they want push the button solution tor their KPIs. It is another story that they are actually firing themselves but this really happenening in everyday drama play in companies.

If company has implemented Business Intelligence solution for “simple” reporting for a while will be able to satisfy needs but soon will not be capable to handle growth in demands.

What can be done?

Some managers showed iniciative and cancelled all internal reports. Aim is too really filter reports tat are needed. When users call and ask about reports it is a trigger to mark report on a list that will be produced in future. Sometimes it is the only way to cut overwhelming and resource consuming work without any additional value.

Let’s not be so drastic and see what can be done

Consider to implement strong policy/methodology what is the scope of internal reporting and what is not, what is the scope of local reporting and business. It is allways good approach to make alignement of internal reporting with external reporting considering definitions and business logic.

Methodology – definitions must be clearly communicated and distributed. Consider to implement strong analytical solutions that have points of alignement with internal reporting KPIs and their definitions.

Implement Cost calculation for every new development. If costs are far higher then value of estimated development.

 This projects and KPI Install prioritization and escalation process. Priorities are necessary for the implementators and business. Resourcers are limited and company has  to decide which of reports to be developed are most important for development. If agreement can not be made among decision group, and that is quite often, then management needs to be noticed aobut problem and need to decide.

Related posts, articles and documents:

• Reporting Problems
• Business Intelligence PDF
• Reporting Business Intelligence Architect
• Reporting responsibilities