Did you know that a full 90% of the data in the world has been generated over the past two years? We’re creating more data than ever before, and this trend is only growing. The only problem: Many businesses still aren’t sure how to capitalize on all of this data.

Oftentimes, the data is inaccessible to the very people who need it most. Salespeople have no way of easily viewing their sales data. Marketing managers can’t easily create the reports they need to view prospect data. As a result, all of that data goes to waste.

The fact is, as businesses generate more data than ever before, self-service reporting becomes increasingly important. You must give your employees a way to pull that data out of your systems and turn it into meaningful management information–without going through the IT department.

Unfortunately, this is still a problem in many companies. They still force end users to go through the process of requesting reports from the IT department, and then waiting around until they’re delivered. While all too common, this process often causes 3 big problems:

1. Wasted time
   End users waste countless hours requesting reports and then waiting on IT. The IT department also wastes time creating the reports…when they could be working on more important tasks.
2. Delayed decisions
   When routed through a single department (like IT), reporting becomes a bottleneck for business, as business users must wait days for the data they need to make decisions.
3. Shadow IT
   Rather than wait for reports from their IT department, more and more users now bypass IT altogether, instead opting for one of the many, readily-available cloud-based reporting options. This further drives a wedge between IT and the business, and creates a security risk, as IT departments can no longer control their data.

If this is a problem in your company, here’s a story you might want to read. It highlights a company going through this very problem, along with the steps they took to fix the situation. I hope you find it useful.