Comment I am a report writer (Score 3, Insightful) 179
As per title...
I am a report writer and dashboard manager. I'm also the main developer of analyses and dashboards (Business Intelligence) for a sizable LoB within my company.
Based on my experience, management is lazy. As in "fucking lazy". They want to sit on their asses, get the reports in their Inbox and never look at them.
I currently manage over 350 items in our main Business Intelligence analytics instance and about 100 more in a secondary instance. There are other environments which we're currently merging, and those contain a few hundred more items (analyses, dashboards, etc). Management asked for most of them. They looked at them once, maybe twice. They only look at about 15-20 of them on a regular basis and that's only because they're forced to do so in order to prepare for mandatory monthly operation reviews.
As for acting based on the data in there, that almost never happens. Some analyses, KPIs and scorecards have been "in the red" for months, years even with no reaction from management. Ironically, requestors come and ask me to build analyses which they already had requested and were published for them months ago, tha means "asking for stuff they already have".
We have a saying in my country: "fish starts rotting from the head". So if you ask yourself what's wrong with them, look at their managers, and their managers' managers and you'll find out. I'm yet to find one single person who gives a shit about data in a report rather than the shade of green the bars are colored.
Amazingly, I still like what I'm doing, but I'm not doing it for them, rather I'm doing it for myself because it keeps me in touch with new technology and allows me to gain a shitload of experience by pushing the environment's capabilities and limits to the maximum. But if you're not really into reporting, just run as far away from it as possible, because it's very likely things won't get better. Soon enough, you'll be asked to provide powerpoint slides. Mark my words! I've been there (but haven't done that).