The Curse of Reporting
Recurring reports can consume analytical capacity without helping anyone decide what to do. The problem arises when organizations keep adding summaries of outcomes while leaving the causes, discrepancies and decisions unexplored.
THE IDEA
The Curse of Reporting
Tracking customer outcomes such as sales helps an organization see how its business is performing.5 Electronic transaction systems and automated processing make regular reports easy to produce. These summaries are useful, but they usually describe what happened without explaining why.
A reporting culture can also generate more reports than managers need. Departments add overlapping summaries, sometimes with conflicting definitions, and analysts spend time maintaining outputs that contribute little to a decision.
The source cites industry estimates that more than 80% of business analysts’ time goes to managing, joining and preparing data, much of it for reporting. That estimate illustrates the potential resource cost; its scope and date matter when applying it to a particular organization.
The opportunity cost is the analysis left undone. Time spent preparing an unused summary could instead go toward investigating a sales change, reconciling conflicting measures or testing a proposed response. Reviewing a report’s users and decisions helps distinguish useful monitoring from work that merely repeats itself.
When to use it
A marketing team that produces monthly campaign performance reports without analyzing why certain channels underperform could instead conduct a root-cause analysis to optimize future spend.
An operations manager who receives daily production reports but never adjusts processes based on them might eliminate the report and focus on exception-based alerts for anomalies.
A finance department that generates multiple overlapping budget variance reports could consolidate them into a single actionable dashboard that highlights areas needing attention.
A healthcare organization reviews duplicated internal reports, maintains required reporting and uses any time recovered to investigate a specific care or operations question.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
The Superfluous Weekly Sales Report
A retail company produces a detailed weekly sales report that breaks down revenue by region, product line, and store. Managers review it but rarely act on the numbers because no analysis is done on why sales changed—e.g., a promotion, competitor action, or seasonal effect. The report becomes a routine output rather than a tool for insight, consuming analyst hours that could be spent investigating root causes.
The Proliferation of Conflicting Dashboards
In a large corporation, multiple departments independently create their own dashboards tracking customer satisfaction. Marketing uses survey data, customer service uses call logs, and product uses usage metrics. The reports sometimes conflict, leading to confusion and debates over which number is correct. No one steps back to ask why satisfaction scores vary, and the organization remains data-rich but insight-poor.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Think of a recurring report in your organization that is produced regularly. When was the last time it led to a meaningful decision or action? If not, why is it still produced?
How could you transform a 'what happened' report into a 'why it happened' analysis? What additional data or context would you need?
Identify one report that your team could eliminate or significantly reduce without harming decision-making. What would you do with the freed-up time?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Evidence-Based Decision-Making How to Leverage Available Data and Avoid Cognitive Biases (Andrew D. Banasiewicz)