Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
What Is a Good Report?
It may be easier to define the characteristics of a bad report; put simply,
such reports:
Waste managers' time
Result in considerable post-processing
Can lead to wrong conclusions
Are just ignored
Good reports help detect, analyze, and solve problems, presumably
before they occur. Good report design involves the collection, and also
the presentation of information. That is, it must be goal oriented and must
address various aspects of the problem life cycle: one report to solve the
low inventory problem, and a very different one to get a handle on the
cash flow problem. A problem-solving approach to report design is
necessary for both the report designer and the manager.
A report must provide answers to a reader's real-world situation and
be designed to support the questions of the actual problem-solving envi-
ronment. What information does he or she need to know, and when?
Report designers need to take a page out of the documentation folks who
have realized that putting softcopies of end-user manuals within the
application is not a replacement for providing context-sensitive online
help. This context sensitivity is what should be built into good reports.
A good report must be crafted with care. It should be designed with
all the care that is given to other application artifacts, such as UIs (user
interfaces) and databases. It is quite common to see that expert advice is
taken for UIs while report design is left to the analysts or engineers, who
are rarely specialists in this field. Last but not the least of the problems
is that the development community has probably never tried to manage
a business using any reports, much less the reports created by them.
The Need for Good Report Design
Report design is, like so much else, an exercise in communications. Even
if one recognizes that an effective report is one that is appropriate to its
purpose and audience, designing it would not be easy. Any decision
maker in an organization has a mental model of the real-world problem.
He or she views his factory or store in a certain way, sees flows of goods
and cash in a particular manner, etc. The report must fit into the reader's
mental model for it to take hold. It must also present only the information
integral to the user's communication needs. This is the bigger problem.
Dealing with mental models, managing outbound communications — are
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