Data Analytics to Drive Reporting and Insights for Timely Decisions and Improved Business Performance

摘要

Many large organizations have centralized reporting teams and data analysts who develop a variety of reports for communications with senior management and project and portfolio stakeholders. In an ideal world, the team understands the intricacies of the work and possesses strong data management and analysis skills. The challenges for these teams include having to use data that is often contained in various disparate systems as opposed to one source, making analysis complicated and time-consuming. Both reporting and data analysis play key roles in influencing and driving decisions and actions that lead to greater value for organizations; however, what often results is significant effort to manually curate the data to update recurring reports and less time for analyzing the data to drive key insights for timely decisions and improved business performance. In addition, large organizations cannot pivot as quickly to adopt industry-leading software or data solutions, resulting in a mixture of incompatible systems with different data formats and components. By developing a standardized reporting framework and a robust system architecture with a historical database from a data-driven perspective, an organization can be equipped with an end-to-end reporting structure and process that allows for transparent data analytics, helping project and portfolio stakeholders and leadership reach decisions more quickly and manage their business more effectively. This paper will focus on four key areas to consider when developing a standardized reporting framework for large organizations: data automation and management, assessing effectiveness and consistency of key performance indicators, layered reporting that caters to the various levels of the target audience, and current systems and tools, including the integration of business intelligence and data visualization solutions. It will include the requirements to implement the framework, the development process, and the benefits that it offers.