Executive reporting? free ebook (for now)

Executive reporting is changing. Or rather the way executives are doing organization-wide reporting is. Consuming information is at an all time high. Executives want to act before they have to react to the market, competition, and other conditions.

This Executive Reporting ebook I'm publishing is not about selling you on one service or another. Nor does it recommend a product or tool. Instead it is about giving you tried ideas that worked for management groups in government and private firms. In a condensed, easily consumable form.

Download pdf here.

I'm sure this ebook is incomplete. But that's why I left the option open for future issues. I hope this encourages you to think and pay attention to what other organizations are doing. And it's free. And it is small enough to email to colleagues or post on your own site.

Thanks for reading.

Marketing matters

Many vendors don't get it. How many vendor demonstrations have you sat through and all you came away with was how their products are great. The best features. Better than the competition. I bet they are in the top right corner of the Gartner quadrants too.

It shouldn't be about how their product functions. Unless the "how" is what you want to know. Sometimes techies and vendor sales people focus on the technology when marketing to business people. Check out John Dodds post ("Geek Marketing"). Following even one or two of his top ten will help with not speaking geek. "Translate the creations of the uncommunicative (techies) into the needs of the untechnical (biz people)".

After all it should be about how the product can work for you or your business.

An Engineer, economist, and a marketer walk into a room

Eirik has a excellent riff on "When will a new technology break through?"

His "most important thing" is very important for BI users (I mean executives, analysts, managers, and frontline staff). Design, good design, will help with users accepting and using BI and business performance measurement and pretty much anything you want used by people.

Creative BI: people want it

Ever have the feeling that some people are reacting to BI with a "oh, it's that again" attitude. Ever heard a user say, "I get what I need, then I get out quick." Not in your department, you say?

BI could be getting stale for people. BI can be known as a difficult tool that provides more information than is really needed. And is delivered to far too few. Perhaps in some cases but there are ways to change that.

Impress users with the "wow" factor. But how?

Design and innovation. Chas Martin is finding that creative, innovative designers are increasingly more relevant within companies. With BI, it's about the user interaction portion. Use something other than the generic out-of-the-box functionality. Boring.

Find out what the winners of the TDWI Best Practices awards have done to impress. They raised their standards and the results benefited users.

BI can be more than pushing mounds of data to users. The experience can be about seeing the information you want quickly and easily. People don't have the luxury of spare time. By helping them get to the point in less time, they may use it more often next time.