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Three Ways To Accelerate Report Modernization

August 17, 2021

Data is everywhere. You’ve got a lot to focus on and it can be hard to stay on top of what’s going on with your business. Report creation in Excel is often time-consuming and can quickly become a nightmare. Modernizing your reports and streamlining your process with PowerBI to get more reliable and consistent reporting across all of your systems can be a game changer for your business. Read on to learn about three key acceleration tactics that our team uses on every implementation that we facilitate.

Lift and Shift, then Attack the Gap 

Consultants love to show up and turn your ways of working upside down, with no consideration for what it does to your business. Rather than turning your reporting on its head, we approach modernization by taking your existing reports and bringing them into the new toolset, with minimal changes to how the report looks, capturing efficiency without creating chaos. Alongside the transition activities, we focus on those high visibility "gaps" that siloed legacy reporting can't address, and those capabilities become the first new things that your stakeholders see. 


Empower Individuals; not just IT

Embracing self-service BI as an organization is a big decision, but one that we feel is a huge accelerant for modernizing how you report. "Curated datasets" allow your business users to perform ad-hoc analysis and report creation based on known good data and without the need to understand databases, relationships, or any other technical components. Think how agile your team would be if IT wasn't on the critical path for every report.


Create sustainable data sources in parallel with report development

One of the biggest pitfalls in report modernization occurs when most of the effort is focused on sorting out databases, data warehouses, and ETL tools rather than on reports and dashboards that deliver value to the business. We believe that good data and good architecture form a necessary foundation for great reporting. Still, they can't stand in the way of early visible report development for your business stakeholders. Identify how the data will be structured when it is finally settled and start building reports from sample data extracts so that users have something tangible from the project early on.

We're here to take care of those spreadsheets hanging over your head. Reach out today to connect with one of our experts and put together the perfect reporting modernization plan for your business.


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