What is reporting? And why would I need it?
Business Intelligence, Consumer Intelligence, Data Analysis: Reporting goes by many different names and is done with varying degrees of rigor and complexity. Whatever you call it, the important part is to distinguish between counting for the sake of counting and counting that answers questions and provides insights.
Traditional reporting is bean counting, as in accounting.
It provides a snapshot of your business or organization. What's in stock in the warehouse? How many employees do we have? What are our revenues? Expenses? How many customers do we have? How many people are we serving?
Measuring "performance," how you're doing...not just what you're doing.
This is where you might hear terms like "return on investment" or "conversion rates." What was the impact of that ad campaign / training program / change in policy? You can think of this as "testing hypotheses," hypotheses of how you can improve what you're doing.
Understanding why you're doing how and what you're doing.
It's the step you really should take before you can even formulate "hypothesis." However, because it's harder to do, it usually doesn't work out that way. How do the people you're serving make use of what you have to offer? What gets in their way? What helps them along? Think of it as bottom-up organizational soul-searching.
Final black-belt level is when data literally becomes your product.
Credit card companies have been scouring purchase histories to rake in profits from carefully timed late-fee charges and interest-rate hikes on select customers. (Although we think there are better ways banks can serve their customers with this data.) Search engines determine search relevance by studying how you search. Anti-phishing browser add-ons collect data from users to figure out which sites are fraudulent. And everyone's favorite impulse-buy feature: Amazon's "People Who Bought This, Also Bought That..."(so why don't you!)
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