Achieving Your Goals Through Effective Insights Reporting and Delivery

Companies nowadays have unlimited access to an ever-increasing amount of data sources, making it easier and faster for managers to base their business decisions on facts. However, this vast array of available data also poses some challenges. Today, there is a high demand for businesses to prove the success of their activities that provide insights, such as market research studies. The BCG/GRBN study shows that the more successful a company is in demonstrating their return on investment (ROI), the greater their chances are of getting an increased budget approved to support new initiatives. This is why it is critical for companies to provide insights that prove the best value-for-the-money and are worth the investment. We’d like to suggest two ways to improve your impact in insights delivery.

1. Deliver the insights to the right people at the right time

Effective decisions depend on the right insights being available at the right time. Just imagine if you need to attend a meeting with only a few minutes’ notice. In this meeting, your team will be discussing ways to optimize the latest campaign. Wouldn’t it be senseless to meet if you didn’t have specific information to share during the meeting? Additionally, decision makers should not have to request information from their IT departments or external consultants prior to meetings, especially if they’re unsure of exactly what information they need. The increased velocity and volume of decision making has encouraged companies to provide business users with direct access to their relevant insights. One way to improve this challenge is to grant controlled access via comprehensive dashboards with other data discovery tools that allow everyone to quickly get to the right information.  Add a closed-loop feedback management module to improve speed of problem resolution and team collaboration. Without having fast, direct access to data, even the most valuable insights can be worthless, hindering the perceived value and ROI.

2. Provide insights that are easy to grasp and understand

Your ROI could be at risk because decision makers may draw the wrong conclusions from the data simply because the insights are not easy to consume. In addition, there is an increasing demand from users to work with the data themselves. This means that data analysis is no longer the sole responsibility of experienced business analysts. In order for stakeholders to easily grasp business insights, there needs to be a clear and simple visual presentation of complex facts. The use of dashboards and other visually engaging tools not only inform, but persuade and inspire users. They highlight correlations and spatial relationships, visualize comparisons, and explain principles, all of which would be difficult to interpret from just charts, tables, or numbers alone. ROI is achievable and in this data-driven world, we believe that organizations must also consider how to guarantee the best usage of reporting options, making insights available for everyone via a single source of truth, and delivering these in a way to make them easy to understand and act upon. Alexander Skorka Managing Director, Dapresy