This content originally appeared on Telerik Blogs and was authored by Peter Vogel
Reporting isn’t free, but you can maximize the value you get from investing in reporting by managing those costs. Here are five changes you can make (and a bonus one) to keep your organization’s reporting costs under control.
Reporting isn’t free. You have to acquire and set up your reporting tools, train staff to use those tools, set up some report repository so people can find reports they care about, integrate some of your reports with your applications and then maintain those reports as your company’s needs evolve. And none of that includes the costs of actually creating reports or the time your Line-Of-Business (LOB) staff spends finding and using any report.
The payoff for incurring these costs is (eventually, as you roll out your reports) better decision-making by your LOB staff. In addition to that, reporting can also drive innovation within your organization by revealing new opportunities and exposing gaps in your existing offerings. Reporting can even help shape long-term strategy by showing your existing reality and extrapolating it into your future.
Since reporting involves spending money up front to get a result later, you have to think of reporting as an investment. And, as with any investment, maximizing your return means lowering your costs and increasing the value delivered.
In this post, I’m going to look at managing the cost side and, in my next post, I’ll look at how report creators can increase the value you get by creating better reports.
There are, at least, five things you can do to lower your reporting costs.
1. Use End-User Reporting
First, of course, if you haven’t already done so, move to end-user reporting. End-user reporting lowers the overhead of creating reports by cutting your (relatively more expensive) IT staff out of the process.
2. Buy, Don’t Build
Second, buy a complete reporting system that meets your organization’s needs. That means not only getting a tool that empowers your LOB staff to create reports but also makes it easy for LOB staff to find the reports they need.
The rationale for “buy, don’t build” is pretty straightforward: You can’t possibly build and maintain a reporting solution that includes both creating reports and making them available to the LOB staff for less money than buying one (and you certainly don’t want to have to shoulder the cost of maintaining any home-grown solution).
And, if you already have a tool … well, don’t be seduced by it. The world has changed since you chose your current reporting solution, and you need to consider whether that solution is meeting your needs right now. In addition to a solution that supports end-user reporting, for example, you need a solution that meets your needs around the “ities”: scalability, flexibility, interactivity, functionality and security … and those are all criteria that have almost certainly changed since you picked your current reporting solution.
For example, while your current reporting tool is meeting your old needs, you may find that now you need two tools in your reporting solution: A data/information-driven tool like Progress Telerik Reporting and a chart-oriented business intelligence tool like Microsoft’s Power BI. Those tools meet different and complementary needs.
3. Consider Embedded Reports
Third: You should also be considering embedded reporting, which allows LOB staff to both create and review reports from within the applications they work with every day. Embedded reporting allows LOB staff to create reports from within the application where they have to implement the decisions those reports support. That can substantially reduce the costs both of creating a report and using it.
As one example, once of the major time wasters in creating reports is connecting to the necessary data. Since reports often share data with their related applications, embedding a report within an application can give the report automatic access to the application’s data.
As a side benefit, embedded reporting also helps users find and share useful reports (Question: Where do I find the report I need? Answer: In the application where you’ll want to use that report’s information). And, of course, embedded reporting reduces the costs in implementing decisions based on the report because the report and the application form a single UX.
4. Provide Users with Reports in the Apps
Fourth, consider how you’ll integrate your reports with your applications: How much does it cost to add reports to your applications and to deliver those report-enabled applications to all the platforms where your users want them? Integrating reports with your applications is an ongoing cost that you want to minimize (here, again, embedded reporting is worth looking at because it assumes that reports are part of the application that hosts them: your reports are integrated with their applications out-of-the-box).
5. Implement Best Practices
Fifth, applying some standards and best practices around reporting helps lower the costs to LOB staff, both in finding the reports the staff needs and using those reports once they are found.
Keep Your Costs Under Control
But, even after doing all those things, you can’t assume that your costs will stay low. Over time, your reporting costs will increase because your reports, like any other software product, have to be maintained. You need to manage your “report inventory” to ensure you aren’t maintaining reports that aren’t being used (or aren’t very good).
Standards in creating reports helps here also. For example, standards around specifying reporting data sources positions you to modify inputs to an infinite number of reports by managing a small number of data sources. Standards in how reports are formatted also enable users to apply what they learned about how to read the first version of the report to later versions of that report (and even to other reports).
6. Audit Your Reports
Which leads to a final tip: Audit your reports. Auditing how your reports are used (including gathering feedback about those reports) allows you to both prune the reports that aren’t being used (the maintenance cost of a deleted report is zero, after all) and to improve the value from reports that aren’t “good enough” (at least, not yet).
In the end, your goal is to ensure that you spend everything you need on your reporting solution… and not one bit more. Managing your cost is the first step in maximizing the return from all your organization’s reports. The second step is increasing the value of your reports … but that’s my next post.
This content originally appeared on Telerik Blogs and was authored by Peter Vogel
Peter Vogel | Sciencx (2024-09-17T15:16:16+00:00) Maximizing Your Return from Reporting, Part 1: Lowering Costs. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/09/17/maximizing-your-return-from-reporting-part-1-lowering-costs/
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