Systems

Reporting and Analysis Are Not the Same Thing

mep Analysis, Systems

Businesses often confuse analysis with reporting. Some invest in complex analytical tools when they really need to streamline the reporting process; others pursue reporting capabilities when they should be seeking in-depth analysis for their data.

The reality is that both reporting and analysis are critical to the success of any business, and deploying an integrated approach to both is key to ensuring they complement each other in a way that generates the most valuable results.

Reporting Analysis
Reporting is a way of providing information about what’s happening in your business. Good reports enable you to ask the right questions about your business. Analysis helps you answer questions by enabling a deeper dig into your data to understand the drivers and root causes behind performance metrics.
Reporting provides a 30,000-foot view of set metrics. Analysis is flexible and gets deep into the weeds to uncover valuable insights.
Reporting takes time. Many companies allocate the first few days of their month and first few weeks of their quarter for many of their employees to assemble reports. Analysis requires more energy and motivation than time and can be more valuable. Successful analysis deserves an exhaustive dig through data to find hidden opportunities and areas needing improvement.
Reports are often considered urgent.  Without careful planning, reporting often crowds out analysis. Reporting may be urgent, but analysis is important, but because it often involves going the extra mile to find the hidden insights, there’s rarely the same urgency to perform analysis on similar deadlines.
Often businesses confuse reporting for analysis, and vice-versa. Reporting and analysis must work together for a profitable business.
Reporting is routine.  If you spend ten hours working on a report, the report gets finished. You have something to show for it at the end of the day. Analysis, on the other hand requires innovative thought, anticipation of future outcomes and confidence to strive for change. If you spend ten hours on analysis, there’s no guarantee you will have an answer.

 

Because companies are busy and often pressured into constant action, they trend toward the easy and familiar way out with reporting. This translates into spending time churning out report after report rather than trying to actually analyze what’s going on and make a difference within the company.  Reporting raises questions; analysis answers them.  You can’t have one without the other.

Balanced Systems

mep Systems

In today’s over-complex world, one way to success is to first start with a question, “What is important to our customers?”

A quick story can illustrate this.

A 5-year old is crying, frustrated she can’t tie her shoe.  You take care of it, dry her tears, problem solved… then she bursts into tears again.  With a little more digging, you learn she’s really mad at her brother.  She just happened to be fighting with her shoe at the same time.

Fixing the wrong problem is unfortunately a common thing.  A better approach is to take time for uncovering and understanding the needs and to clarify what you know about the challenge as well as what you don’t know.  This way you can target efforts and achieve results that matter faster and more effectively.

Data can always be gathered but are you measuring what is most easily measured (data that are in our legacy systems and data warehouses) rather than what is most meaningful?  Technologies are available to easily collect this data and they are improving.

So many companies have yet to figure out how to use their valuable small data but they are ‘leap frogging’ to big data without a second thought.  Today the concepts around big data are leading the use of big data.  The actual data are what’s available, most likely not collected with our business questions in mind, and we are trying to make it work.

There’s no question the new technologies will be used.  If we’re going to really capitalize on big data, we need to add human insight at machine scale. We will need some type of balanced systems that not only perform data analysis, but then also communicate the results that they find in a clear, concise narrative form.