A New York Journal newspaper story in 1897 quoted Mark Twain (now famously) as saying—in response to an article in another newspaper that claimed Twain was dying in poverty in London—that “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
In recent years, some in the IT industry made similar pronouncements about reporting and dashboards, deeming them a status similar to what Twain had ascribed to him and had to rebut.
Like Twain’s retort, our data show that those considering dashboards and reporting “dead” also exaggerate. Over the last six years of our surveys, respondents annually rank reporting and dashboards as the top two (of now 44) technologies and initiatives strategic to business intelligence (BI).
There is good reason that reporting and dashboards remain by far the most popular BI user paradigms, and it’s rather simple. The data show that they deliver substantial business and organizational benefits.