Big Data

5 R = REPORT RESULTS

Big Data and analytics present a phenomenal opportunity for all business regardless of size or sector. But even if you start with strategy, identify the metrics and data that could help you answer your SMART questions and drive your strategy, and even if you then applied analytics to that data to identify insights, you still need to report insights in a way people understand.

Big Data and analytics may well pave the way to some really cool innovations, greater customer understanding and real time monitoring of what's actually happening in the business. But unless the results are presented to the right people in a meaningful way then the size of the data sets or the sophistication of the analytics tools won't really matter and the results will not inform decision-making and improve performance.

Of course Big Data and analytics are far sexier than humble reporting. Thankfully, reporting is in the middle of an extensive and exciting makeover that promises to help unleash the true potential of data.

Business leaders are already struggling to keep up with all the data they come across in the course of a normal week. They already receive floods of emails, countless reports they only ever skim read, if at all, so the idea of adding to that data explosion is not very welcome news for most business executives. All too often the real nuggets of information that could really impact strategy and tactics are lost within a 50-page report.

A perfect example of failing ...