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May 31, 2003

A Report by Any Other Name

The term "report" can mean anything, causing confusion about which styles of reports end users need

by Philip Russom

I used to know what a report is, but now I'm not so sure. The word "report" can mean just about anything, from banded and grouped reports (the meat and potatoes of traditional reporting) to dashboards and scorecards (the accoutrements of recent reporting practices) to real-time alerts in wireless devices (the cutting edge of reporting technology). But my point is more than mere semantics: The multiple meanings of report make the arcane task of matching a particular user with an appropriate style of report even more obtuse, with the business user the casualty.

So, how did we get into this situation, and what can we do about it?

A Brief History of Reporting

In the beginning (circa 1975 for me), you knew a computer-generated report when you saw one. For instance, the office gofer delivered several reports to my desk every morning printed on "green-bar paper." The numeric clutter of green bar — expressed as interminable tables spanning sheet after sheet of accordion paper — was all we had, with no delusion of greener pastures for reporting. Soon enough, however, reports hit the laser printer and then, a decade later, went online, delivered as files over a network. But the numeric clutter of green bar lives on in today's highly detailed production reports that are usually for financials, operations, and regulatory compliance.

Along a different evolutionary line, reporting merged its analytic cousin, online analytic processing (OLAP), producing executive information systems, which evolved into today's dashboards. With consultants and vendors promising a new prosperity through "a dashboard in every browser," some corporations have rolled these out to thousands of end users, from CEOs down to shipping dock supervisors.

A similar development brought reporting together with various forms of business performance management (BPM), a much-needed shot in the arm that gives methodological structure to analytic applications for the Balanced Scorecard and similar approaches. Reporting technology excels in information delivery, so it's a common enabling technology when performance metrics are presented via report styles such as dashboards and scorecards.

Reporting has also commingled with other technologies and practices, spawning several new species, such as analytic reports (an OLAP query clothed in report garb), analytic applications (a bucket of related reports), analytic procedures (a series of reports in procedural order), and advanced data visualizations (where a graphic is the report and its user interface). To cloud the issue further, reporting technology serves many nonreporting purposes, for example printing paychecks, invoices, and direct-mail pieces. And some reports pass machine-to-machine, as a clandestine form of data integration unseen by human eyes.