Every reporting offering touts self-service capabilities. Classic example, you're looking at a variance report, there's a negative variance in revenue for last period. Which products are selling and which are not?
No problem, says the demo person, you can just click on this number, select "Products", and here's a breakdown by product. I confess to being guilty of showing this to people in the past.
But what is better is to just realise that a) revenue is really important (surprise) and b) if you sell products, you're going to want to see the variance broken down by product.
And by your different locations, market segments, whatevever it is you have.
So why not skip the part where users have to decide to look into that, and have a dashboard which breaks revenue down by all those things straight away?
When you have a reporting tool, more dashboards are free, and yet so often people behave like they're some sort of non-renewable resource.
Of course, self-service is useful, but experience tells us that only a small segment of users will ever do their own queries, no matter how shiny your tool is. You'll get a lot more value just surfacing known useful slices of data for them so they can immediately apply them to their jobs.
For those that do drill down, though, it can be very useful to ask them what they're looking for - because the chances are good that if one person is drilling for it, more people would take value from it if you just put it on the dashboard.
