I was recently asked by some friends to review the problem statement below and provide some feedback. I wanted to share this with my network and ask for your feedback as well. Can you relate to what is being said? Does it resonate with you? I would appreciate any feedback you can provide.

A challenge that many organizations have is the ability to extract meaningful informationfrom their data repositories, information that can give them valuable insight into better understanding their operations.

• Typically organizations have many different and complex reporting tools generating reports by various departments. These ad-hoc and unstructured reports that are loaded with varying charts, untested formulas, and pages and pages of useless information desensitizes the senior executives and takes attention away from the core issues. Or,
• They have many reports, built by different teams, measuring the same KPI, but providing different values. Again lowering the confidence level of senior executives. Or,
• They have a large number of useless reports that do not provide any meaningful information to their recipients. Resulting in unread reports and lowered confidence in the measurement of true performance.

Another challenge facing organizations aside from the availability of robust reports and easy to use reporting tools, is the data itself is lacking in quality to allow meaningful analysis.

• Teams aren’t documenting all the relevant information to define the problem. Or,
• Teams aren’t documenting all the relevant information on how the problem was resolved. Or,
• Teams aren’t properly classifying the problems so meaningful reports can be generated.

The absence of quality data, supported by a lack of meaningful reports ultimately results in a failed continual improvement program. Processes such as trend analysis, root cause analysis, defect prevention, and any other initiative to conduct analytics on the data to better understand the operational behaviour of the enterprise, so areas of improvements can be identified, will not exist. The net impact to the organization as a result, is lowered, 1 - Customer Satisfaction, 2 - Revenues, and 3 - Profits.

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