Most organizations do not have a shortage of dashboards. They have a shortage of reports that make decisions easier. 41% of business leaders struggle because data is too complex or inaccessible, 33% cite an inability to generate insights from it and 30% say they are overwhelmed by the amount of data available. More reporting does not automatically solve any of those problems.
For Nathan Koengeter, reporting is a decision-design problem. His work across analytics, business intelligence, market research and enterprise data integration has repeatedly required him to turn technical information into something a manager can use. Before another dashboard, deck or recurring report is built, Nathan Koengeter starts with three questions: What decision will this support? What does the decision-maker actually need to know? And what action should follow when the number changes?
1. What Decision Is This Report Supposed to Support?
Reports easily become organizational habits. A team updates the file because it was updated last month. Another chart is added because somebody once asked for it. Eventually, the document survives even when nobody can explain which decision it is supposed to improve.
Nathan Koengeter starts in the opposite direction: define the decision first. A sales report may guide territory allocation. A customer report may identify retention risk. A market-research report may prioritize an audience. A data-quality report may identify where an upstream process is failing.
If nobody can state the decision clearly, Nathan Koengeter would question whether the organization is ready to design the report.
2. What Does the Decision-Maker Actually Need to Know?
Once the decision is clear, Nathan Koengeter turns to subtraction. Which metrics are essential, and which are present simply because they can be produced?
Reporting tends to expand over time. Every stakeholder adds a field, comparison or visualization. The result becomes comprehensive enough to answer almost anything and difficult enough to answer the immediate question quickly.
41% of executives cited a lack of ability to generate insights from data, 34% cited lack of trust in data and 31% said there was too much data. The problem is not necessarily scarcity. It is often interpretation and prioritization.
Nathan Koengeter’s career has involved communicating analytical information to different audiences. A technical team may need exception-level detail. A manager may need the magnitude of a problem and its likely cause. An executive may need three numbers, the implication and the decision. Nathan Koengeter believes the report should match the user.
3. What Action Should a Change in the Number Trigger?
A metric becomes more useful when the organization knows what to do when it moves.
A churn report that shows deterioration without identifying who investigates it is descriptive. A data-quality dashboard that highlights failures without a threshold for intervention can become another inbox artifact. A customer-segment report that never changes messaging or allocation is simply documenting an opportunity.
Nathan Koengeter’s process-improvement work is built around a different standard. In enterprise data environments, he has identified recurring errors, improved source-data quality, standardized intake, automated repeatable checks and reduced bottlenecks. The objective was not only to observe a problem. It was to change the process producing it.
For Nathan Koengeter, reporting should follow the same logic. When possible, a metric should have an owner, an expected range and a response when the result crosses a meaningful threshold.
Good Reporting Should Reduce Uncertainty
73% of business leaders said data helps reduce uncertainty and improve accuracy, while 66% said data can reduce the influence of personal opinions or egos in business conversations. Nathan Koengeter sees those benefits as conditional: the information has to be trusted, understood and connected to a decision.
A monthly report that takes 45 minutes to interpret may be less useful than a five-line exception summary delivered when action is required. A dashboard with 30 metrics may be less useful than three metrics connected to operating decisions. Nathan Koengeter’s rule is simple: the format should follow the decision, not the other way around.
The Best Report May Be the One You Stop Producing
Recurring reports develop inertia. Once created, they can survive changes in teams, strategy and technology because nobody revisits the original reason they existed.
Nathan Koengeter’s broader career shows a preference for removing repetitive work rather than merely becoming faster at performing it. He has applied automation and process improvement to recurring data workflows so that skilled people can spend more time on analysis and decision support.
That creates a final test. If a report has no defined decision, no clear audience and no action attached to a meaningful change, Nathan Koengeter would not automatically redesign it. He would first ask whether it should exist at all.
Before building another report, Nathan Koengeter’s three questions force the business case into the open. What decision does it support? What does the user need to know? What happens next? A report that can answer all three has a job. One that cannot may simply be more information.
