Reporting to Compete…
Over the years I have amused, entertained and even annoyed many of my team and colleagues with anecdotes and sayings that I have amassed during my career. One of my favourite mantras that I picked up at Harvard Business School is “buy to qualify, build to compete”.
When we apply that to information systems, we would look at how every organisation requires a payroll system or a general ledger. Certain industries will even use a specific system or piece of software because it is mandated, based on statutory or other requirements.
That is the qualify part of this statement. An organisation will always buy off the shelf when it comes to these types of systems because everyone has one and it is not going to present any type of competitive advantage.
The other part of the statement however is where it gets a little more interesting. This is where companies will invest in technology customisation to develop a point of difference, and perhaps get a leg up in a highly competitive environment.
So how does this relate to management reporting?
After all, everyone has one, and all companies spend a lot of time and effort analysing data, measuring performance, and making decisions that will differentiate themselves from their competitors.
The last part of this activity is the important element. Building reports to compete. So where do we start…
Traditionally organisational reporting has focused on measuring activity such as sales, operational performance, or production output. I am going to let you in on a little secret… everyone does it… so where is the “compete”?
Don’t get me wrong, all of these things are extremely important because your competitors are doing it too. That means that you need do all of these things (and more) just to qualify. The question is what are the other measures that make you unique in the marketplace and how do you report on these.
The first part of the equation is the data. What is the organisational content or intellectual property that makes you stand out from the rest?
This might be information regarding channel partner performance or the metadata that describes the knowledge articles in your document management system.
It could be the personal details you maintain about your clients and how you best interact with them or it might be compliance and/or feedback information from your case management system.
Don’t worry about where it resides at the moment. We can deal with that later once we understand what it is that we are trying to measure.
Now that we understand the “what”, we need to recognize how accurate, robust, and complete the base data set actually is. This is what I term the “Triple A’s” of the data.
Age – How old?
Amplitude – How complete?
Accuracy – How precise or correct?
It is important to recognise that if any one of these is lacking it is going to affect the accuracy of the final reporting outcome.
In the first instance the Amplitude, or size, of the data may be affected because you have not had the opportunity to collect a larger sample. This reduces over time as the data sample grows.
This then has an adverse effect on the Age of the sample. Is it true that data collected two years ago is relevant to the market today?
Accuracy of the data, I think, speaks for itself. Garbage in, Garbage out. Organisations need to recognise and celebrate the accuracy of the content in their systems as this will reflect in the performance of their reporting systems.
OK, so now we know what we want to measure, and we have a high level of confidence that the data elements we are looking to measure against. So where do we find these “bits and bytes” and how do we bring it all together.
This the power of the Microsoft Power Platform, and in particular Power BI. Many organisations will prioritise the development of internal Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, and other centrally consolidated data sets. Again, I am not looking to downplay the importance of these activities, but often the focus of these tools can be more “qualify” than “compete”.
The ability of Power BI to quickly bring together data from sources as diverse as SQL databases, Excel Worksheets, CSV files, Public Web Sites, amongst others, and to build relationships that connect all of these tables in a single data set, allows organisations to swivel rapidly when developing against ever changing reporting requirements.
The power of agility cannot be understated here. In a competitive marketplace, where a differentiation may only last weeks or even days, organisations need to be able to pivot quickly, either to stay ahead or to keep up with their competitors.
The final part of the equation then is the report itself, and I am going to be a little inflammatory here and say that the format of the final outcome is not as important as the points we have already discussed.
Sure, it is valid to say that the end user needs to be able to easily and quickly, read and interpret the information being presented, but whether this is as a KPI tile, or a Pie Chart, or a GIS enabled map, the presentation is superfluous if the data does not live up to Triple A expectations.
That being said, Power BI provides the ability to present data interactively to end user expectations and provides a number of out of the box visualisations as a base to work with.
These visualisations are highly configurable, allowing organisations to customise report presentation with organisational branding, and the visualisation library can be extended, either via the Power BI community resource library (download) or development of custom visualisations.
The real power of the Power BI presentation layer is the ability to quickly develop executive management dashboards by pinning filtered tiles from visualisations across multiple Power BI reports. This allows the end user to consume targeted information detail from several reports (each focusing on separate data sources) in a single page.
The beauty of this is that the user can then combine both “qualify” and “compete” reporting elements in a single view, ensuring they are managing the daily operations whilst focusing on their competitive differentiator.
Written by Ian McVicar
Practice Lead – Dynamics 365
Ian is currently the Practice Lead for Dynamics 365 in Sharing Minds and has in excess of forty years technology management experience.
Having been part of the technology management team for one of Australia’s largest retailers for much of his career, Ian also served as CIO for a leading training and employment services organisation prior to joining Sharing Minds.
Ian has a Master’s Degree in Information Systems Management and has attended executive leadership training at Harvard Business School in Boston MA.
