"Why would you want reports when you have a dashboard?"
Because a dashboard is a transient thing, which is a snapshot in time and which you can't look back for historical records.
Corporations want things they can file and hold onto, and a PDF can do that much better than a dashboard. You can submit a report to an external entity... a snapshot of your dashboard? Give me a break.
This is stupid, because it sounds like "why would you need your paystub when you can look at your bank balance". They're different things, and you can glean more information from looking at a series of reports, than an instantaneous dashboard.
If you think a dashboard does the same thing, then maybe your understanding of what they get used for is lacking?
There is a reason why management is asking for it. And your inability/unwillingness to deliver it means that you're either acting thick, or thinking that you are the most important aspect of your business.
God, it's like IT in the 90s all over again... we don't care what you want, this is what we're giving you because we think it's cool.
This whole article reads like "we in IT are too uninterested in giving management what they want, so I need someone to help me phrase it better".
"Why would you want reports when you have a dashboard?"
Because a dashboard is a transient thing, which is a snapshot in time and which you can't look back for historical records.
I don't know which reporting environment you're doing your stuff in, but maybe you should change it. What I'm using can save snapshots, provide historical analyses, even match current data against snapshots and provide changes with drilldowns. Or maybe we have different definitions of "dashboard".
That's not a dashboard, that's a reporting system that joins dashboarding and reporting. Dashboards are current transient data. Anytime you go back in time, that's a report. You just supported the OP's claim.
I guess it's a naming convention which has different meanings. A quick look here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_(management_information_systems)) brings this definition up:
"an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance."
OBIEE (yeah, I know, Oracle, sucks, bleah, bad) refers to "dashboards" which contain live reports, but you can set filters for those reports in such a way that they don't modify every time you refresh the dashboard.
Agreed with everything you said. I guess I was focusing more on the idea of online reporting versus document-based reporting. A PDF export is something that's static and quickly slips into obsolescence, also it's an uncontrolled document which might or might not be relevant a day, a week or a month from now. I had plenty discussions with people who used to export reports to PDF and challenge the online reporting after a couple months when, due to inherent changes in the DB data, the online report would no lo
You are just extending the same mind set. Why is what _you_ want more important than what someone else wants. Every position in my company uses data slightly differently. Admins want to know what is having problems and trouble shooting the right things, Finance needs reports to know whether they need to give rebates, marketing needs data to generate slides showing trends in performance, developers want to know if their latest patch is working (sometimes), etc... Sure, the admins and developers are probably more concerned with a dashboard like view which is constantly updating. The rest of the people want, and need, a static weekly report without having to go do something to get it.
When those automatic weekly reports get removed and replaced with manual steps, people tend to jump right to the "those people are just lazy" crap.
It's laziness because you add dozens, sometimes hundreds of man-hours a month which your company bills to people just because you don't feel like spending 5 minutes a week clicking on a fucking link.
That 5 minutes of work never existed before an IT guy made a change. The IT guy made the change without considering and/or caring that it added extra work to people. That is the IT guy being inconsiderate and forcing people to do more work, not people being lazy.
Oh yeah, add 5 minutes of work for a director (50 dollars lost) and remove 100 employees' man hours (1000 dollars gained), I see how that doesn't make any sense...
Absolute Bullshit. You added 5 minutes a week, every week, to the director, finance team, law team, marketing team, sales team, etc.. etc... And what did you gain in the process? The one IT guy can claim "I have an awesome dashboard" on Slashdot, because the rest of the IT team was fine with the old system.
Stop trying to exemplify your nonexistent business logic.
If it takes a person more than a month to create a report, you're doing it wrong. Seriously wrong. We could create reports much faster than that when we were writing them in COBOL and hitting discrete files on disk and tying them together ourselves. I understand some newfangled systems can do better than hand-coding COBOL and can use these novel relational databases.
Please don't open that particular can of worms:) The reasons why some people go through this effort of manually putting together reports is unreasonable management demands. They want powerpoint slides in that specific format, using those specific fonts, having that specific logo in that specific place, using data sources which are not connected to each other, and God forbid if you put that graph 2 millimeters to the right. It would be the end of the world.
I can create reports really quickly, but they don't s
So you're saying that we had the advantages of only being able to print a report on green-bar paper on an old-fashioned line printer? And that, since this was pre-PC, all the files had to be on the main computer because there wasn't anywhere else for them? (Okay, some existed as punch cards only, but those were easy to read in.) And we didn't have to deal with any proprietary formats because the only ones were the computer's file system and character length? And that's why we were able to produce them
I said that, back when I was hand-writing reports, it took far less than a month. You responded with a bunch of detail that simply didn't exist when I was hand-writing reports, so I'm describing the conditions I worked under back then.
I usually don't respond to ACs but you weren't trolling so there goes: The complexity involved when handling reporting for a large(r) organization prohibits full automation. There will be groups which need different inputs and the same type of outputs, the simplest example being regions (EMEA, APAC, AMER and their subdivisions). Add hierarchy-based groups on top of that and everything turns into a nightmare to manage and automate. The most optimized solution would be to build a single report with input varia
You cannot verify previous numbers from an instantaneous dashboard. If the June numbers indicate a change should be made, and someone in August wants to investigate that decision, it's entirely possible they cannot recreate the data used to justify the initial decision.
I watched exactly this issue become a problem for a company last month. Their client tried to reproduce numbers they were given in a report using their dashboard. They dashboard data didn't match the report, and there was much conster
There is a reason why management is asking for it.
The reason might be one of these two:
1. Management knows what they're talking about: there's some valid business reason why the information needs to be in the requested form; and the tech guy just isn't aware of that reason.
2. Management thinks they know what they want, but their request reflects an incomplete understanding as to what technical solutions are possible, and which one would really best serve the business.
I encounter both situations regularly. Sometimes I investigate and find out that management really does have good reasons. Sometimes I conclude that I'm dealing with case #2 above. It's not that I think management is stupid; it's just that their expertise is in a different area from mine. I often try to educate, depending on how important I think the issue is. Fairly often, my effort succeeds: managers generally want to do right for the business; they understand that the tech guy knows things and is worth listening to; and sometimes they agree that my proposal is better.
However, of course the effort doesn't always succeed. Unless you're writing software on your own without having to please clients or management (e.g. as a hobby, or in an academic setting), it's just a part of life as a paid tech guy that you sometimes have to implement decisions which were made without the benefit of as much tech expertise as you have yourself.
Reports are consistent: they report the same data, in the same format thus making for easy comparisons
Reports are easily filed. Why would a manager want to waste their time learning how to retrieve past data and then learn how to compare it with stuff form other dates/times when they can simply print it and highlight what they want. Paper and disk space are cheap - their time is not.
Reports are portable. You can take them away with you, you can show them to other people.
Reports are secure. You can print them and be sure that whoever you show them to cannot access anything else. ANYTHING
Reports can be easily incorporated into a manager's "product" (presentations, summaries, proposals and archives) without them having to learn any new methods. Again: it's a trade-off between cheap IT resources and their expensive time.
And probably most important of all: reports are familiar. Never forget that IT is providing a service to the business. It's not the place of IT to dictate to the business how they do their work - it should always be the other way round.
Add:
Reports don't take additional time to generate every time you look at them.
Reports don't require a constant on-line internet connection
Reports still work when the dashboard server, database server, internet, electrical grid, etc. are all down.
I am a manager. I created a dashboard for our product that our operations people use. But when I go to management meetings, I need to present static data to the upper management. They don't want to sit and watch me enter date ranges and wait for data to come ba
Your last sentence is forgotten, ignored or pompously presumed an imposition far too frequently by far too many in IT.
The business is their client. If they were freelancing and pulled the same attitude, they would immediately be looking for another client to replace the one who just walked.
The business is their client. If they were freelancing and pulled the same attitude, they would immediately be looking for another client to replace the one who just walked.
The role of an internal IT organization is not the same as the role of a freelancer. A freelancer is hired to do a job. If I am the CEO and I hire an IT team, then I want to hear about it if my IT team thinks that some other part of the organization is making a mistake, and I want to hear from the rest of the organization if they think that IT is making a mistake.
IT has to listen to the business for sure, but IT should be a part of the business as well.
And probably most important of all: reports are familiar. Never forget that IT is providing a service to the business. It's not the place of IT to dictate to the business how they do their work - it should always be the other way round.
Well, it would be more accurate to say that IT, like the rest of the business, has a role to play in providing value to the owners. All organizations in a business tend to have unique roles and perspectives, and it is important for them to work together if the business is going to be successful. Often IT tends to be in more of a service delivery role, but any business that wants to perform well is going to make sure that IT is also in a consulting role when it comes to deciding how the mission is accompli
However, of course the effort doesn't always succeed.
Also, sometimes it's just easier to give people what they want than it is to convince them that they don't really want it. Sometimes you have to ask whether "being right" matters, or if it's harmless and easy to comply with a silly request.
I do think I know more about technology than management does. Management knows more than I do about how to run a business. Neither one of us has the entire picture. We have to inform each other as well as we can, so that our business decisions reflect good judgment across all of our areas of expertise.
Sometimes we have to explain things to each other, and sometimes those explanations need to go into depth. Some of my best moments in business have been when someone went to the whiteboard and effectively
Because a dashboard is a transient thing, which is a snapshot in time and which you can't look back for historical records.
This is absolutely true, but there is another factor (as noted by other posters) -- the effort required to read them.
It's the same as mailing lists vs. forums. The mailing list is fully integrated into my daily activities -- I am already reading my mail. I don't have to log into a forum, perhaps type a password, select the appropriate search (or use multiple dialogs to select the i
I'm sorry you read that in my question - I thought it was clear that we did, in fact, provide the reporting services they were used to. We integrated ElasticSearch with the reporting system - Jasper Reporting - that they already used. My way - as a provider of solutions - is to do just that: provide a solution to the clients' requests. - wether the clients are internal or external.
What I was asking - and the debate that followed shows that it's not such a clear-cut vision - was
Logic doesn't apply to the real world.
-- Marvin Minsky
Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because a dashboard is a transient thing, which is a snapshot in time and which you can't look back for historical records.
Corporations want things they can file and hold onto, and a PDF can do that much better than a dashboard. You can submit a report to an external entity ... a snapshot of your dashboard? Give me a break.
This is stupid, because it sounds like "why would you need your paystub when you can look at your bank balance". They're different things, and you can glean more information from looking at a series of reports, than an instantaneous dashboard.
If you think a dashboard does the same thing, then maybe your understanding of what they get used for is lacking?
There is a reason why management is asking for it. And your inability/unwillingness to deliver it means that you're either acting thick, or thinking that you are the most important aspect of your business.
God, it's like IT in the 90s all over again ... we don't care what you want, this is what we're giving you because we think it's cool.
This whole article reads like "we in IT are too uninterested in giving management what they want, so I need someone to help me phrase it better".
Hmmm ... (Score:2)
Nailed it.
Submitter is trying to solve a different problem than what management needs.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because a dashboard is a transient thing, which is a snapshot in time and which you can't look back for historical records.
I don't know which reporting environment you're doing your stuff in, but maybe you should change it.
What I'm using can save snapshots, provide historical analyses, even match current data against snapshots and provide changes with drilldowns.
Or maybe we have different definitions of "dashboard".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not a dashboard, that's a reporting system that joins dashboarding and reporting. Dashboards are current transient data. Anytime you go back in time, that's a report. You just supported the OP's claim.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess it's a naming convention which has different meanings.
A quick look here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_(management_information_systems)) brings this definition up:
"an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance."
OBIEE (yeah, I know, Oracle, sucks, bleah, bad) refers to "dashboards" which contain live reports, but you can set filters for those reports in such a way that they don't modify every time you refresh the dashboard.
Anyway, nitpicking.
Re: (Score:2)
The connotation of "Dashboard" is that it may give you a trendline, but not necessarily be able to pull up trendlines for arbitrary time intervals.
There are of course dashboards that do so, but it is reasonable to argue that those are really dashboard/reporting hybrids.
It sounds like TFA is referring to a dashboard that is fully featured in that department. Few are, even these days.
In any case, if the product doesn't make autodefinition of intervals and side-by-side comparisons as easy for managers as pull
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed with everything you said.
I guess I was focusing more on the idea of online reporting versus document-based reporting. A PDF export is something that's static and quickly slips into obsolescence, also it's an uncontrolled document which might or might not be relevant a day, a week or a month from now. I had plenty discussions with people who used to export reports to PDF and challenge the online reporting after a couple months when, due to inherent changes in the DB data, the online report would no lo
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:4, Insightful)
You are just extending the same mind set. Why is what _you_ want more important than what someone else wants. Every position in my company uses data slightly differently. Admins want to know what is having problems and trouble shooting the right things, Finance needs reports to know whether they need to give rebates, marketing needs data to generate slides showing trends in performance, developers want to know if their latest patch is working (sometimes), etc... Sure, the admins and developers are probably more concerned with a dashboard like view which is constantly updating. The rest of the people want, and need, a static weekly report without having to go do something to get it.
When those automatic weekly reports get removed and replaced with manual steps, people tend to jump right to the "those people are just lazy" crap.
Re: (Score:2)
It's laziness because you add dozens, sometimes hundreds of man-hours a month which your company bills to people just because you don't feel like spending 5 minutes a week clicking on a fucking link.
Re: (Score:3)
That 5 minutes of work never existed before an IT guy made a change. The IT guy made the change without considering and/or caring that it added extra work to people. That is the IT guy being inconsiderate and forcing people to do more work, not people being lazy.
Re: (Score:1)
Oh yeah, add 5 minutes of work for a director (50 dollars lost) and remove 100 employees' man hours (1000 dollars gained), I see how that doesn't make any sense...
Re: (Score:2)
Absolute Bullshit. You added 5 minutes a week, every week, to the director, finance team, law team, marketing team, sales team, etc.. etc... And what did you gain in the process? The one IT guy can claim "I have an awesome dashboard" on Slashdot, because the rest of the IT team was fine with the old system.
Stop trying to exemplify your nonexistent business logic.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, as a matter of fact I did, it was part of the new implementation BRD.
Let me know if you have other questions.
Re: (Score:2)
If it takes a person more than a month to create a report, you're doing it wrong. Seriously wrong. We could create reports much faster than that when we were writing them in COBOL and hitting discrete files on disk and tying them together ourselves. I understand some newfangled systems can do better than hand-coding COBOL and can use these novel relational databases.
Re: (Score:2)
Please don't open that particular can of worms :)
The reasons why some people go through this effort of manually putting together reports is unreasonable management demands.
They want powerpoint slides in that specific format, using those specific fonts, having that specific logo in that specific place, using data sources which are not connected to each other, and God forbid if you put that graph 2 millimeters to the right. It would be the end of the world.
I can create reports really quickly, but they don't s
Re: (Score:2)
So you're saying that we had the advantages of only being able to print a report on green-bar paper on an old-fashioned line printer? And that, since this was pre-PC, all the files had to be on the main computer because there wasn't anywhere else for them? (Okay, some existed as punch cards only, but those were easy to read in.) And we didn't have to deal with any proprietary formats because the only ones were the computer's file system and character length? And that's why we were able to produce them
Re: (Score:2)
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
I said that, back when I was hand-writing reports, it took far less than a month. You responded with a bunch of detail that simply didn't exist when I was hand-writing reports, so I'm describing the conditions I worked under back then.
Re: (Score:2)
I usually don't respond to ACs but you weren't trolling so there goes:
The complexity involved when handling reporting for a large(r) organization prohibits full automation. There will be groups which need different inputs and the same type of outputs, the simplest example being regions (EMEA, APAC, AMER and their subdivisions). Add hierarchy-based groups on top of that and everything turns into a nightmare to manage and automate. The most optimized solution would be to build a single report with input varia
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This.
You cannot verify previous numbers from an instantaneous dashboard. If the June numbers indicate a change should be made, and someone in August wants to investigate that decision, it's entirely possible they cannot recreate the data used to justify the initial decision.
I watched exactly this issue become a problem for a company last month. Their client tried to reproduce numbers they were given in a report using their dashboard. They dashboard data didn't match the report, and there was much conster
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a reason why management is asking for it.
The reason might be one of these two:
1. Management knows what they're talking about: there's some valid business reason why the information needs to be in the requested form; and the tech guy just isn't aware of that reason.
2. Management thinks they know what they want, but their request reflects an incomplete understanding as to what technical solutions are possible, and which one would really best serve the business.
I encounter both situations regularly. Sometimes I investigate and find out that management really does have good reasons. Sometimes I conclude that I'm dealing with case #2 above. It's not that I think management is stupid; it's just that their expertise is in a different area from mine. I often try to educate, depending on how important I think the issue is. Fairly often, my effort succeeds: managers generally want to do right for the business; they understand that the tech guy knows things and is worth listening to; and sometimes they agree that my proposal is better.
However, of course the effort doesn't always succeed. Unless you're writing software on your own without having to please clients or management (e.g. as a hobby, or in an academic setting), it's just a part of life as a paid tech guy that you sometimes have to implement decisions which were made without the benefit of as much tech expertise as you have yourself.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Reports are consistent: they report the same data, in the same format thus making for easy comparisons
Reports are easily filed. Why would a manager want to waste their time learning how to retrieve past data and then learn how to compare it with stuff form other dates/times when they can simply print it and highlight what they want. Paper and disk space are cheap - their time is not.
Reports are portable. You can take them away with you, you can show them to other people.
Reports are secure. You can print them and be sure that whoever you show them to cannot access anything else. ANYTHING
Reports can be easily incorporated into a manager's "product" (presentations, summaries, proposals and archives) without them having to learn any new methods. Again: it's a trade-off between cheap IT resources and their expensive time.
And probably most important of all: reports are familiar. Never forget that IT is providing a service to the business. It's not the place of IT to dictate to the business how they do their work - it should always be the other way round.
Re: (Score:3)
Reports don't take additional time to generate every time you look at them.
Reports don't require a constant on-line internet connection
Reports still work when the dashboard server, database server, internet, electrical grid, etc. are all down.
I am a manager. I created a dashboard for our product that our operations people use. But when I go to management meetings, I need to present static data to the upper management. They don't want to sit and watch me enter date ranges and wait for data to come ba
Re: (Score:2)
The business is their client. If they were freelancing and pulled the same attitude, they would immediately be looking for another client to replace the one who just walked.
Re: (Score:2)
The business is their client. If they were freelancing and pulled the same attitude, they would immediately be looking for another client to replace the one who just walked.
The role of an internal IT organization is not the same as the role of a freelancer. A freelancer is hired to do a job. If I am the CEO and I hire an IT team, then I want to hear about it if my IT team thinks that some other part of the organization is making a mistake, and I want to hear from the rest of the organization if they think that IT is making a mistake.
IT has to listen to the business for sure, but IT should be a part of the business as well.
Re: (Score:2)
And probably most important of all: reports are familiar. Never forget that IT is providing a service to the business. It's not the place of IT to dictate to the business how they do their work - it should always be the other way round.
Well, it would be more accurate to say that IT, like the rest of the business, has a role to play in providing value to the owners. All organizations in a business tend to have unique roles and perspectives, and it is important for them to work together if the business is going to be successful. Often IT tends to be in more of a service delivery role, but any business that wants to perform well is going to make sure that IT is also in a consulting role when it comes to deciding how the mission is accompli
Re: (Score:2)
However, of course the effort doesn't always succeed.
Also, sometimes it's just easier to give people what they want than it is to convince them that they don't really want it. Sometimes you have to ask whether "being right" matters, or if it's harmless and easy to comply with a silly request.
Re: (Score:2)
I do think I know more about technology than management does. Management knows more than I do about how to run a business. Neither one of us has the entire picture. We have to inform each other as well as we can, so that our business decisions reflect good judgment across all of our areas of expertise.
Sometimes we have to explain things to each other, and sometimes those explanations need to go into depth. Some of my best moments in business have been when someone went to the whiteboard and effectively
Re: (Score:3)
This is absolutely true, but there is another factor (as noted by other posters) -- the effort required to read them.
It's the same as mailing lists vs. forums. The mailing list is fully integrated into my daily activities -- I am already reading my mail. I don't have to log into a forum, perhaps type a password, select the appropriate search (or use multiple dialogs to select the i
Re: (Score:1)
I'm sorry you read that in my question - I thought it was clear that we did, in fact, provide the reporting services they were used to. We integrated ElasticSearch with the reporting system - Jasper Reporting - that they already used. My way - as a provider of solutions - is to do just that: provide a solution to the clients' requests. - wether the clients are internal or external.
What I was asking - and the debate that followed shows that it's not such a clear-cut vision - was