In the creation of a software product, there is often a tendency to focus just on the features and not spend enough time looking at how people need to leverage the value that can be provided by reports.  Great reports are of value for traditional enterprise software, hosted product offerings, and even to a lesser degree for products that are sold directly to an end user.

Prove Value: One of the primary benefits of good reports is that you can help to remind your customer of the value you are providing in your product.   While the features of the product may be “cool” or “necessary”, it is through reports that you can highlight and remind  your customer of the business or productivity value that your product provides.   Reports should help to answer the questions on ROI (return on investment) on your product.    Make sure that the reports highlight the business value as to why they should continue to use your solution.    Reports should highlight the amount of work accomplished over periods of time and help reiterate how service levels are met through using your product. 

Increase Stickiness: Properly designed reports create a barrier that helps keep your product from being replaced by the competition.   If your customer is using your reports for a management tool to show how service levels are being met, then it becomes part of the culture of how to perform a service.   This creates a barrier because the more your service is recognized through the management chain, then the more difficult it is for your product to be replaced.   Reports need to make sure they focus on  providing visibility not only for the operational worker, but for the layers of management all the way up to the executive team.   If  your report forms the basis of an executive dashboard then your product has become much more strategic to the organization.   Strategic products are much more likely the be renewed.

Help Operational Effectiveness: Well designed reports should be able to highlight areas of operational effectiveness as well as operational weaknesses.   The reports that show how much work is being done over time can provide standards for companies to judge their level of efficiency.   You want to make it easy for your customer to be able to set and measure goals based upon analysis of the data in the reports that you supply.

Highlight Changes Over Time: Often times people get so caught up in the day to day work that it can become easy to lose sight of the big picture.   Reports can help make sense of the individual tasks that are performed and show trends – good and bad – over longer periods of time.    These bigger picture results should help managers see what direction they are headed and what corrective actions need to take place.

Make It Easy To Drill Down to Details: Well designed reports make it simple to see patterns across large sets of data and from those sets be able to drill down into supporting detail.   Make sure that at each level of data you provide in a report that you let your customers drill down or link to other supporting information that was used for that set of data.   Interactive drill down reports turn your data  into a context from which business decisions can be made.   Customers that are in this mode will be hesitant to replace your product if they are used to basing decisions upon your well constructed reports.

Dashboards And Navigation: It isn’t enough just to have reports, you need to make sure that there are attractive and functional dashboards that are provided out of the box.   Customers today have a number of dashboards that they work with.   If you don’t supply a portal with easy to read dashboard level information you are not meeting the bar of what is done in market leading products.   The key isn’t to have 1000 reports.  The key is to provide a dashboard and contextual links to truly interact with and make sense of the data.    A flat list of a large number of reports will not have near the impact as a lesser number of reports that are all tied into an attractive dashboard.

Focus on Solving Issues, Not Numbers of Reports:  For each report out of the box that you provide, you should be able to answer a question like, “What worker type is going to use this and what actionable results will happen?”   Too many reports can be just as much as an issue as no reports.   The key messages and takeaway value of what you are trying to highlight may not be visible.   For every report that you supply you ought to be able to answer what business value is generated with the context of that report.

Solicit Input from Customers:  Most product managers spend a great deal of time talking to customers, sales engineers, and analysts about features of the product.   When was the last time your product managers talked to this same group about the reports that are needed?    Make sure that you have the same process to get input on reports just like you solicit input on the operational features of your product.   Listen to not only the feature that they are looking for, but understand the operational and business context in which that feature will be used.   Then you can target reports that highlight the value your features provide relative to those operational and business contexts.

Make Reports Actionable:  You should be able to take action right from within the report.   Choose technologies that will allow you to link right to your operational features from the context of reports.  Don’t make the customer navigate to a different location to fix an issue or take action based upon what they see in a report.   Provide the link to perform the action right within the context of the report.

Make Your Reports Easily Extensible:  There are always going to be cases where your customers have specific requirements and they need to add just one more column or make a minor change to your SQL query. Make sure that you have a simple way for customers to use your out of the box report and customize it for their needs. Don’t consider your database schema to be a “secret sauce” that you need to protect. If your database schema is difficult for a third party to understand then provide views or stored procedures that simplify the process of interacting with your data model.

Ensure that it is easy to email your reports:  Make sure that it is easy for your customers to email your reports. You should have an option for setting up a distribution list and having the reports automatically emailed to that list on some defined schedule. Many report consumers would rather have the report show up in their inbox for a quick review and not have to login to the server.

Don’t reinvent the wheel:  There are a number of controls and publication frameworks for Windows and Linux that can simplify your coding effort for creating reports. Many of these frameworks already support a number of the ideas outlined in this article. To the degree that you leverage an existing framework you will have more time to focus on the proper reports and less time on the infrastructure for generating a report in the first place.

Make Reports Available Via APIs:  Your reports should be able to be “consumed” via an API. Often this can be accomplished via nothing more than an XML feed. Mashups are commonly used to create new value on top of what you may provide out of the box and so making your data available via an API/XML feed will aid in those mashups. This is another way that will help ensure that your system is more leveraged and sticky for the customer.

Make Your Product Supportable:  You should consider a few reports that will help your customer or even you own support team quickly ascertain the status of your product operations.   Do you have reports that highlight configuration changes?   Do you have reports that show performance, security, and error log analysis?    The same techniques that you use to highlight the business value can also be used to monitor and highlight the operational health of your product in production.

The author would like to thank Brent Bishop and Lincoln Cannon for their feedback on this article.