21st-Century Green BarThe legacy of green-bar reporting lives on, in both positive and negative waysContinued from Page 1 Inactionable InfoglutOne of the practices learned from green-bar reporting is to pack lots of information in one report, so each report can serve the information needs of many users. This tactic leads to long reports — a kind of information oversupply, or infoglut — where most of the information is irrelevant to an individual report consumer. In the old days, businesspeople reading green-bar reports flipped through thick stacks of paper — reams of green, I call them — on a time-consuming quest for a few digits relevant to their jobs. Nowadays, many report consumers are likewise encumbered, as they click and scroll through corpulent online reports. Infoglut kills productivity. The report consumer wastes time wading through a swamp of data looking for relevance. Even when the consumer finds relevant information, the appropriate action is seldom apparent, because the information doesn't target the consumer individually and because it's in the context with so much other irrelevant and distracting information. When you bring the worst practices of 20th-century green-bar reports to 21st-century online reports, you automate a problem rather than solve it. The result is "21st-century green bar," a hybrid that can't quite satisfy the reporting requirements of either century. Green-Bar LegacyThe legacy of green-bar reporting lives on, in both positive and negative ways. Despite my tirade against numeric clutter, I think it has an important place in today's highly detailed production reports, usually for financials, operations, and regulatory compliance. In fact, with federal legislation pending and investors demanding more oversight of corporate operations, production reporting — delivered online — will experience an upsurge in the next few years. In this rare case, 21st-century green bar is fully appropriate to the task at hand. But there are ample cases where you should avoid green-bar practices. For instance, numeric clutter is anathema to report styles that support business performance management, namely dashboards and scorecards. A report in these styles should contain little more than a few metrics and key performance indicators, and these should be clearly relevant to the individual user for whom the report was designed. This way, decision-making is done at a glance, instead of via a time-consuming swim through a flood of data. And the presentation of information (often visual) points directly to an immediate action. When online reports are read on a PC, they're limited by screen area. The emerging practice is to keep online reports small to fit PC screens and emerging media, such as handheld devices. Small reports also reduce loads on the servers and networks that produce them, whereas numeric clutter increases loads. Report producers and consumers should embrace 21st-century media, such as online reporting, as a way of creating reports of targeted content that give far-flung report consumers a small set of information that's relevant and actionable. The catch, however, is to also embrace the best practices of newer reporting styles, without vestigial traits creeping in from older styles. Otherwise, you're just delivering 21st-century green bar. Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.philiprussom.com] is a Giga analyst at Forrester Research Inc., where he advises user organizations about business intelligence, data warehousing, and data integration. RESOURCESRelated Article at IntelligentEnterprise.com: "A Report by Any Other Name" May 31, 2003
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