Reporting & Analytics · Software Insight

The forty-tab problem

Reporting grows to forty tabs, each answering a question someone once asked, none answering the questions leadership asks now. Everyone works harder each quarter to produce a pack nobody reads past page one.

The Monday pack, delivered before the first coffee

Dashboards are not the fix (by themselves)

A dashboard earns its place the same way a report does: by answering a question someone with authority asks on a rhythm. ‘Who owes us money and how old is it?’ is a question. ‘Sales by region by product by week’ is a data dump, not a question.

Start from the questions

The unit of good reporting is the question, not the data set. Each report in the standard library exists because a customer could state its purpose in one sentence. To build a first report pack, management writes down the questions it actually asks; anything that answers no question is archived.

What to do about it

Write the Monday questions first, the ones leadership asks at the start of every week, and build reporting to them. Prefer live numbers to refreshed ones; a figure a week old is not current. Insist on drill-down to source entries. Schedule the pack to arrive by email before the meeting.

More data is not the answer

The scarce resource in management is attention, not data. A dashboard with forty widgets spends that attention in fractions. A full-time analyst can beat a fixed report pack, but most organisations of five to two hundred staff cannot justify that role. The practical choice is a few well-chosen numbers rather than many unread ones.

Questions this view raises

How many KPIs should a dashboard carry?
Between five and nine, at the smaller end for boards. A dashboard is an allocation of attention, and attention does not scale: each tile beyond the useful few dilutes the rest. The test for every tile is the Monday question — what decision does this number change, and who moves when it moves? Tiles that fail the test belong in the report library, findable on demand, not on permanent display.
How do we stop reports multiplying once everyone can build them?
Publish, don’t proliferate: authors build in private, but shared reports enter a read-only library after a named approver signs them off, and superseded versions are retired rather than left open. Then prune on a schedule — each quarterly review removes any shared report nobody has run since the last one. Curation is what keeps a reporting system a decision tool rather than a slowly accreting museum of past questions.
Where this shows up in our software

Insight Reports starts each report pack from the questions management actually asks. You can see these principles applied on the projects pages and throughout the InsightSuite module pages.

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