Several BI products feature report libraries that help companies track and store their mushrooming report volumes, availing reports for re-use by multiple user groups. Microsoft SharePoint comes to mind here, and I particularly like Lyzasoft for this kind of functionality. Lyzasoft’s robust search and social media features let business users collaborate in building reports, actually tagging as they go so that that metadata evolves apace. Users can then recommend and further annotate these reports in an active and friendly way.
And by “active and friendly” I mean the Lyzasoft features, not the business users, though hope springs eternal.
Most companies just aren’t there yet. Those that pride themselves on using a common source of integrated data for a variety of analytic needs nevertheless replicate reports faster than you can say “organizational silo.” This is more tragic than the rising number of spreadmarts. It results in poor decision management, which ultimately ends up costing companies a lot more than report-glut.
This past July a Washington Post investigation revealed that over 850,000 government employees had top-secret security clearance, and 33 new building complexes — the equivalent of almost three Pentagons — are under construction in the Washington, D.C.-area to support Homeland Security. You can’t help but wonder if all of those 850,000 workers really need top-secret security clearance to do their jobs. And whether there’s a bureaucrat who can actually explain the unique and special purpose of each of those 33 new buildings.
In last month’s Newsweek Fareed Zakaria broke this down even further, reporting that the new Homeland Security infrastructure produced 50,000 reports annually, or “136 a day — which of course means few ever get read.” Zakaria quoted an anonymous senior official familiar with these reports saying, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.”
Business users have become victims of their own competence. Want information? Create a report! Less generously, many users are now on autopilot. Building a new report might be fulfilling, but a report is still just a means to an end. The real success is in the decisions we’re making. That’s assuming, of course, we’re making the right ones.
Now consider that fact that having top secret clearance does not imply you have the rights to read all of the documents classified as top secret because your clearance is limited to a specific agency, I don't think the total number of people with top secret clearance is so frightening. It did make for a great headline though but there was little in the way of context provided in the Post article.
Why is this important to the topic of business intelligence and the number of reports that organizations generate? Well, with all the ill-conceived reports, sensationalist media reporting and then industry regurgitation of these reports, it's no wonder we have so many reports on reports, correcting reports and restating reports.
The problem with BI and with intelligence reports in general is that they are fundamentally lacking "intelligence". We need a process to ensure that "reported" data is factual and complete and as I've shown in this example, we haven't reached that level of proficiency. So each of us misquotes and mis-reports the data so others can do likewise until we are buried in reports.