[marniewebb]

As one of those business people, I find I’m not very good at requesting reports. There is a gap between what I think is interesting and what actually is interesting. I use spreadsheets (and sometimes visualization tools) to help bridge the gap and make a better on going request to our reporting team.

Often, this is learning for me. I have a bunch of Stephen Few’s books and use exported CSV files to figure out which reports are useful to me and my org. When I find them, I do make a request for standardized reporting. These often become the basis for regular review meetings. In those meetings, we still come up with instances where we need to export to CSV and get into the data to understand what we are looking at.

Our work is going through a big shift this year that means our historic data is not helpful in predicting trends. That’s increased the need for this kind of engagement with the underlying data.