Executive Reporting
Data-driven decision-making is fast becoming the norm in competitive markets, and executives must have consistent and timely access to data-backed business intelligence. Responsible for the performance and success of their company, those in upper management positions can’t afford to rely on gut instinct alone. Executive reporting is one means through which they can regularly obtain the information they need to support their tactical and strategic decisions—decisions critical for keeping their company profitable and growing.
When your decisions have a large impact on the business, you require actionable information—based on the latest data—that you can use to streamline operations, manage risk, and implement transformative initiatives. With the right BI solution, executive reporting efforts are accelerated, IT bottlenecks are eliminated, and your top management gets the visibility and insights they need to take smart actions fast.
The importance of executive reporting
Executive reporting is used to provide senior management with a high-level view of corporate performance to monitor the business and take action based on insights obtained through business data analysis. When done right, executive reports should give top-level decision-makers an accurate, at-a-glance, and holistic view of all relevant aspects of the business. Executive reporting ensures that they have the information they need to examine trends, spot risks, evaluate key opportunities, and understand the brand’s overall performance. An executive report should help them quickly ascertain where attention is needed. It provides them with information essential for determining what’s working and what’s not and where new strategies or directions should be pursued.
Improving executive reporting with BI software
With traditional business analysis tools, executive reporting can be a laborious process and consume precious resources for the collection, consolidation, and analysis of data from multiple business units and the manual compilation of reports. Modern business intelligence software expedites the process, enabling fast, accurate, timely production and publication of reports. With the right BI solution, data can be easily and efficiently collected from multiple data sources and combined in a controlled manner to supply your users with a single version of the truth. Self-service BI tools allow business analysts to quickly create charts, tables, and other data visualizations with drag-and-drop simplicity, that can then be incorporated into high-quality reports for leadership.
Many self-service BI tools also offer powerful dashboarding functionality. Executive dashboards are an excellent supplement to executive reporting. Accessible from web browsers and mobile devices, they can provide senior management with easy access to the most up-to-date information about the business through interactive visual displays of organizational KPIs, metrics, and data gathered from diverse data sources. Executives get an updated, bird’s-eye view of performance across all units and initiatives. And with visual analytics, they can dive in and interact with the data themselves, letting them explore different dimensions and perspectives when dealing with a particularly complicated situation or problem.
Go beyond executive reporting with AI-powered analytics
When it comes to modern BI software, executive reporting is just one tool in a robust toolset of reporting and analytics solutions provided by industry-leading vendors like Qlik. The newest generation of BI platforms leverage AI to simplify data analytics and put advanced analytics capabilities in the hands of non-data scientists. AI-infused BI tools can automatically generate data models from your raw data sets and even build routine dashboards and reports. Dashboards become a jumping-off point for executives that want to get a deeper understanding of the data. And with conversational analytics, executives can ask questions about the data in regular business language via a personal digital assistant without having to learn any additional skills.
Qlik makes executive reporting easy and empowers more users with AI-fueled insights
Qlik is leading the new generation of modern BI solutions for the enterprise with its powerful data analytics platform, Qlik Sense®. With support for self-service data discovery and visualization, conversational analytics, interactive dashboards, embedded analytics, executive reporting, and more, Qlik Sense is the most complete solution for enterprise analytics on the market today.
Built on a unique associative analytics engine, Qlik Sense indexes and grasps all relationships in your datasets, surfacing valuable hidden insights users might otherwise miss. Unlike with query-based BI tools, users can freely search and explore data from a diversity of sources, combining, loading, and working with data using intuitive visual and conversational analytics functions. Qlik’s Cognitive Engine provides context-aware insights suggestions, automates processes, and supports natural language interaction, so users spend less time learning new tools and more time strategizing. Retire legacy and BI reporting systems and empower everyone in your organization with accessible data analytics.
FAQs
What is the purpose of an executive dashboard?
It supports performance monitoring and decision-making efforts by providing busy executives with a quick and easy way to access business intelligence relevant to key initiatives. By summarizing a variety of complex data points using easy-to-grasp visualizations, dashboards help executives make sense of massive amounts of data fast, find answers to pressing questions, and arm themselves with actionable insights into all relevant areas of the business.
What is a KPI report?
It provides a summary of an organization’s progress towards meeting specific objectives and will generally contain various charts, graphs, and other data visualizations, offering an interpretation of the underlying metrics. It is used to evaluate performance and inform decision-making and strategic planning.
How can executives use business intelligence (BI)?
They can use it to get both holistic and granular, historical and real-time views of various aspects of the business through easy-to-use dashboards and reports. Through executive reporting functions, BI tools can be used to provide senior management with continual access to accurate and timely information—data relevant to their roles and actionable insights to support informed and efficient decision-making.
