Reporting Operations
Part of BI adoption and reporting operations
Assigning an owner to each recurring business report
Assign a business owner and technical contact to a recurring report, then record the decisions and handover each role requires.
Give every recurring business report an accountable business owner who can explain its decision, audience and acceptable use. If someone else maintains its data path or publication, name a technical contact. A creator's name in a file does not establish that either responsibility has been accepted.
Match the owner to the decision
Start with the meeting or workflow that uses the report. The business owner should be able to approve its purpose and definitions, and decide how readers should treat a disputed result. For a monthly service report, that might be the manager responsible for the service review; the analyst maintaining the report may be its technical contact.
Do not assign a whole catalogue to a sponsor who cannot review individual outputs. Once decision responsibility has moved, the original builder should not remain the default business owner. Ask the proposed owner to confirm the report's decision, audience and escalation route.
| Responsibility | Decision or response to assign |
|---|---|
| Business report owner | Confirm the question, population and whether a qualified result may be used. |
| Metric or dataset owner | Resolve the meaning of a shared figure or a disputed calculation. |
| Technical contact | Investigate refresh, mapping, access or delivery failures. |
| Backup contact | Coordinate the response when the usual contact is unavailable. |
One person may hold several roles. Record the responsibilities separately so a successor can see what needs to be handed over.
Make the assignment usable
Keep a short record with the report's stable name, business owner, technical contact, audience, decision cadence, approved definition or dataset, distribution route and discrepancy contact. State who decides whether to hold a result or display it with a visible qualification.
Consider a report due for a Monday review when a required source has not arrived. The assignment should make clear who informs readers, who investigates, and who decides whether an earlier figure with its cutoff can be used. This is a suggested handover question, not a test result.
Transfer ownership when responsibility moves
A restructure, departure or changed audience should prompt a handover. Give the incoming owner the purpose, definitions, known limits, dependencies, recent issues and outstanding requests. Ask them to confirm that the report still serves a current decision. A shared dataset's owner need not change merely because the report owner does.
Record the effective handover date and an interim support contact. If nobody accepts the business purpose, flag the report for a purpose review. An administrator can maintain access during that review without being described as the business owner.
