Reporting implementations

Now you have a well defined strategy. What are the implementation steps?

Reporting should be a function of its own under a manager with a real seat on the management team. If they are to provide a responsive service the reporting team has to be aware of business changes coming over the horizon just as soon as the operational managers.

You will need IT developers and business staff - analysts and operations. It is likely that you will need two or three business level staff to do analyses and daily runs for every IT developer. A project secretary and librarian will also be useful for any but the smallest sites.

Identification and commitment to a set of reporting tools. These may range from business accessible spreadsheet developments and pivot tables through to ASP page and ActiveX control development, Actuate or Crystal Reports, Access and server side developments with OLAP databases and datamarts and warehouses.

The business and reporting analysts on your team may need training in "reporting skills". Certainly if you have clerical support people they will need training in running and supporting the reporting tools they are using.

The developers will almost certainly need training in "reporting skills"  no matter what their technical proficiency.

Three key "reporting skills" needed are:

1. understanding the difference between accuracy and precision and knowing when each is needed (always need to be accurate and often need to be precise)
2. the ability to distinguish between "this report is faulty because the reporting process is wrong" and "this report is faulty because the business process is wrong"
3. knowing that just because it runs or compiles without errors does not mean it the report is correct!

Whatever your reporting team develops has to be rolled out to the business end-users. For that to work properly those end-users need to understand what is in specific reports, what the measures mean (they may be counter-intuitive), when they are valid and what value they bring to their business.

In short, the reports and the reporting process has to be continually "sold" to the end users.

The reporting team has to learn from the business. They must monitor report usage and abusage. Just as the reporting team will expect the business users to contribute resources to reporting development workshops so they should contribute to business process development.