While they throw numerous cross-department teams at the problem or embark on yet another technology initiative, year after year organizations continuously labor through the reporting process, delivering bland, formulaic reports that provide little decision-making value.

Many business intelligence (BI) solutions in the marketplace today—the very tools designed to interrogate data and produce meaningful insights—are only making things worse.

Meanwhile, emergent self-service BI tools promise to empower end users and improve speed to insight. While they can produce attractive data visualizations in dashboard style reports, they haven’t made it any easier to produce the professional, narrative-style reports that many business leaders require.

In this paper, we explore these in greater detail, discuss why many BI solutions fall short, and explain how Pyramid Analytics excels in each of these key areas.