reporting practices and the data-driven organisation

The way that an organisation designs and structures its regular reporting has a significant impact on its capabilities as a data-driven organisation.

Achieving both efficient and effective regular reporting is an important milestone in becoming more data-driven, and there are plenty of actions available to bring this closer.

Effectiveness vs Efficiency in reporting

Effectiveness relates to the suitability of your reports to their purpose - are they correctly informing the right decisions? This could loosely be considered the business side.

Efficiency relates to how long your reports take to compile, and how easy they are to maintain and extend. This could loosely be considered the technical side.

effective reporting

An effective report provides decision makers with a useful, quantitative base to help them make decisions. This strikes right at the heart of the journey towards becoming a data-driven enterprise.

By nature of being effective, these reports contain the right information, presented in a way that suits the message, and are grounded in how the reports audience will take in the information.

Quick tips for effective reporting

  • Use the right visualisations
  • Use suitable units of measurement
  • Use informative benchmarks and ratios to put the numbers in context
  • Use collaboration and a process of continuous improvement to keep reports relevant and at their best
See Do's and don'ts of effective reporting for details

efficient reporting

In order to be a data-driven organisation, your team needs to spend their time on making data-driven decisions and investing in new models and visualisations that will assist in future decisions.

Inefficient reporting hamstrings these efforts by taking up time in compiling reports, and making them more demanding to adjust when it comes to making more of your decisions better informed by data.

Quick tips for efficient reporting in Excel

  • Use Get & Transform to bring data into your workbooks and transform it as needed
  • Use Power Pivot to build a cohesive model of your data for the report
  • Use Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts where practical to present data

Conclusion

By improving the effectiveness and efficiency of regular reporting, your team will spend less time completing low-value tasks, and more time making decisions based off the data that they present.

What’s more, some of that extra time can go into creating more nuanced and valuable analyses, and your one step further down the path to becoming a data-driven organization.