"over 150 canned reports included"

by Craig McQueen 2008-12-07 23:59

Software makers often use the volume of pre-created reports as a selling point of their software. The number of reports doesn't matter. The question is does the system have the report relevant to the user with the right data presented in an understandable way? Having many reports just makes it difficult to sort through to find the relevant one. Even then it is never exactly what the user wants. One the first questions users ask is "does it do ad-hoc reporting?". As well, there there can be extraneous information on the report that is not relevant to the task at hand. It becomes noise in the process of making decisions.

 It is much more valuable for someone to understand the people using the reports and the decisions they need to make with the report information.

A handful of customized reports targeted at user groups will result in higher productivity, less errors and quicker decisions than 150 canned reports.

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