IT Survey: Key Findings on Reporting Needs

 

How are IT business professionals managing their reporting needs?

According to a recent survey conducted by the SMA Research Team, here are some key findings:

Key Finding #1: As an organization’s size grows, there was an increase in the amount of reporting noted as being needed daily and quarterly.

Key Finding #2: Flexible Management of report distribution and/or creation (where end-users receive some pre-configured reports and can customize views) was the most employed requirement and strategy by Enterprises, regardless of size. 

Key Finding #3: Business Analysts in Mid-Sized Enterprises are more likely to employ a Flexible Management approach while the growing, Large Enterprises favor Centralized Management (reports created by one team and then distributed). Small Enterprises still have many end-users responsible for authoring their own reports.

How does your company compare? Do you have access to all the information and reports you need to be proactive and meet your business goals?

More on reporting.

IT Survey: Ad-hoc and Summarized Dashboards – Very Important

 

Results from our survey show that IT professionals ranked Ad-hoc
and Summarized Dashboards very high in importance for their reporting needs.

When respondents were asked to rank a set of features in order of importance to them and their associate report users, ad-hoc reporting was highest, followed by dashboards to summarize key metrics.

• Over 60% of all users want Ad-hoc “On-the-Fly” report creation.
  The number of responses indicating the importance of ad-hoc reporting grew with the size of the organization — 62% in Small, 80% in Mid-Size, and 83% in Large Enterprise.
• 84% of Large Enterprise users want more dashboards to get an “at a glance” view of data to make faster decisions.
  Similar to Ad-hoc reporting, the number of responses indicating the importance of dashboards grew with the size of the responding organization — 51% in Small and 60% in Mid-Size.
• Web-based or client-based application ranked as least important to users.

Take our quick poll to the right: “How happy are you with your current Reporting capabilities?”

Check out two reporting solutions that offer Ad-hoc reporting and dashboards: SMART for HEAT and SMA Reporting Edge for IT.