Remove Barriers to Effective Reporting

Implementing effective reporting at any organization is not easy (including higher education institutions).  This post outlines the barriers to effective reporting and provides solutions to eliminate these barriers.

Here are a few barriers:

1. Incomplete requirements
2. Lack of knowledge about the data
3. Data quality issues
4. Lack of training or knowledge about available reports or tools
5. Politics that causes no cooperation between departments
6. Information Technology and other departments (such as Institutional Research folks in HE) don’t even speak the same language or have a working relationship
7. Lack of resources and time
8. Issues with access to the data
9. Slow turnaround for new reports or data
10. Lack of trust in the data

Which ones are you experiencing?

From our observation we know that reporting is hard.  Many organizations continue to struggle with reporting.  And they have failed with various reporting tools while other organizations are successful with the same reporting tools.  So the solution is not about the technology.  It is a people and process problem.

Here are 11 suggested ways to eliminate barriers to successful reporting.  If you practice at least 6 of them, your reporting environment will significantly improve.

• Communication
• Collaboration
• Knowledge of the data
• Transparency
• Data ownership and stewardship
• Well implemented reporting tools
• Standard, controlled and well understood processes
• Best practices
• Knowledge base/ collaboration tools
• Great training and documentation
• Data governance, data intelligence and data management

Reporting is difficult.  Make sure that you focus on the people involved in the data and reporting to achieve success.  It is easier to achieve when a solution like Data Cookbook is used.  Create a culture to eliminate barriers to effective reporting at your organization.

For additional reporting related resources click here.  And for the complete library of data governance related resources click here.

If you are interested in data governance services by IData experts or the Data Cookbook, a leading data governance solution for any type of organization, please . 

(image credit:  StockSnap_8E6HMW8QMF_ReportingBarrierFence_BP #1018)