Reporting vs. Analytics – distinctions

TrackResults Analytics is excited to see so many companies maturing in technology. This proactive approach allows aggressive capture of strategic advantages and larger market share, simply by applying  higher level analysis than your competitors.
Jesus Betanzos, : VP  Latin America BizDev, says, “The primary difference is the ability to easily apply multi-directional analysis to the reports used in the decision-making process.”

In their book “Com­pet­ing on Ana­lyt­ics,” Thomas Dav­en­port and Jeanne Har­ris empha­size the impor­tance of trust and cred­i­bil­ity between the ana­lyst and deci­sion maker. “Deci­sion mak­ers typ­i­cally don’t have the time or abil­ity to per­form analy­ses them­selves.With a ‘close, trust­ing rela­tion­ship’ in place,  exec­u­tives will frame their needs cor­rectly, the ana­lysts will ask the right ques­tions, and the exec­u­tives will be more likely to take action on analy­sis they trust.”

General report­ing only trans­lates raw data into infor­ma­tion, whereas  analytics trans­form data and infor­ma­tion into insights. Report­ing helps com­pa­nies mon­i­tor their online busi­ness and be alerted to when data falls out­side of expected ranges. Good analytics should raise ques­tions about the busi­ness from its end users.

One way to dis­tin­guish whether your orga­ni­za­tion is empha­siz­ing report­ing or analy­sis is by iden­ti­fy­ing the pri­mary tasks that are being per­formed by your ana­lyt­ics team. If most of the team’s time is spent on activ­i­ties such as build­ing, con­fig­ur­ing, con­sol­i­dat­ing, orga­niz­ing, for­mat­ting, and sum­ma­riz­ing — that’s report­ing.      The goal of TrackResults analy­tics is to help answer ques­tions by inter­pret­ing the data at a deeper level and pro­vid­e action­able indicators.

Analy­sis  focuses  on  dif­fer­ent  tasks such as ques­tion­ing, exam­in­ing, inter­pret­ing, com­par­ing, and validating.