Now that we have given a brief overview of what has been covered this far, we now turn our attention to reviewing our reporting tools in light of the challenges that we covered in the first chapter. Hopefully, you noticed in Chapter 1 that each challenge contains diametrically opposing conditions. For example, as we consider the intended audience of our report, we must decide if our report should meet the needs of day-to-day operations personnel, or if we are trying to satisfy external stakeholders. In comparing two reporting tools side-by-side, we may discover that one reporting tool perfectly meets the set of requirements imposed by our day-to-day operations personnel, whereas the other tool is more suited for external stakeholders. Other tools, we might find, fit somewhere more towards the middle of these two extreme conditions.
Our goal, then, is to select the reporting tool that has the best capability to meet our required...