In huge numbers of ordinary businesses, reporting still relies heavily on spreadsheets which is time consuming, low on security in terms of no audit trail as well as being prone to human error. It is fast becoming a hot topic for businesses to evaluate their data management.
“It is still essential to understand how data comes together to provide the necessary ingredients to enable better decision making”, said Stuart McHardy, Managing Director of CloudMargin. “If you want to manage your business, you first need to know what your business is doing, and that comes from data, data and more data. You need a software reporting tool that is a rapid-fire alternative to the slow pace and rigidity of traditional reporting methods”.
It is just not enough to present people with raw data – it simply does not help. What firms need to be able to do is present intelligent visualized data that is easy to interpret. Therefore, the most important demand clients need to make from their technology partners is one that gives them the ability to gain insight into their business: to scrutinise past actions and the outcome of these actions and to make better-informed business decisions for the future, but in a more secure and reliable fashion. This is achieved through the use of a cutting edge Business Intelligence (BI) tool.
A good BI tool gives the user real-time, visualised data that allows for speedier and more in depth analysis. It is vital companies utilise technology solutions that give them maximum usage of BI tools, allowing their staff to connect to volumes of data that originate in a variety of different formats, and then reproduce this in a single view format allowing for not only a quicker insight of data but also a deeper understanding of the information.
Lets face it; work is stressful at times. With a million and one other duties to complete, the last thing you want to do is waste your work day trying to find someone who has the time and energy to stitch a variety of spreadsheets together which still then presented to you in an archaic fashion that is hard to analyse and understand at the best of times. Reporting tools allow busy users to have access to automated and visualised data that people of all skill levels are able to interpret which saves a lot of time. In fact, one technology software provider, Tableau, is embedded within CloudMargin’s system and enables our clients to produce ‘10 times the analysis in half the time, with half the staff’ compared to spreadsheets.
It is a great time for organisations to adopt a real-time, interactive and visualised method of accessing data that permits organisations to explore, monitor and report data more effectively; enabling them to question the data that’s presented to them, and make better informed business decisions.