Reporting is broken, long live reporting.
For all the talk about dashboards and data visualization, the conversation about reporting can seem like a deafening silence. That’s why I’ve started to refer to reporting as the dark matter of the modern workplace. We’ve set about studying it, starting with a survey of 71 people who do reporting as part of their jobs. While the small sample size and imperfect representation may limit the strength of our conclusions, there were some interesting theories to be considered:
Reporting isn’t just for analysts.
Quite the contrary. We grouped respondent roles into two buckets:
Data-centric roles such as data analysts and data scientists; and
Business-centric roles such as project manager, client/account manager, and executive.
We received responses from almost twice as many people in the business-centric roles vs. data-centric roles.
In his article about The Next Unicorn Analytics Platform, Kevin Smith states that the “one analytics platform to rule them all will be for business users.”
2. Above all, reporting needs to be accurate and error-free.
We asked our survey respondents to choose which features they found most (and least) valuable for their reporting solution. This was a selfish attempt to understand what Juicebox capabilities will (or won’t) resonate with our reporting audience. Here’s what we saw:
The runaway winner was a desire for accuracy in reporting. More interesting to me was the dichotomy around reporting capabilities for interactivity and data exploration. For many people, the ability to interact with the data was most valuable feature. For another segment, it was among the top three least important features. The world may split into people who want interactive reports and those who want static reports.
3. Reporting is a huge time suck.
Over 50% of respondents said “It is a significant part of my week.” Another 20% expressed a desire to save some of the time they are currently committing to reporting.
The exhaustion was palpable.
4. Excel and PowerPoint are the reporting tools of choice.
It is 2020. We thought we’d be flying with jetpacks and flipping through numbers like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
Instead, we are still using Excel and PowerPoint as the primary tools for reporting data. PowerBI and Tableau show up — but are clearly not the most useful tools when it comes to communicating data. Maybe it is time for something better!
5. Audiences of reporting feel a whole lot of “meh”.
A majority of respondents (63%) said their audience would like something better from their reporting. I was surprised that only 6% characterized their audience as truly dissatisfied.
If this doesn’t sound like your experience with reporting, you can still fill out our survey. We’d still love to hear from you.