Five Reasons Executives Hate Business Reports—and How SPARK Fixes Them

With the birth of accounting and financial management during the Industrial Revolution, corporations began tracking their performance to hold teams accountable, support decisions, and guide business strategy. You would think we would have mastered business reporting over the past two hundred years, but you will often hear complaints from business leaders like:

1. ‍Overwhelming: “This report is way too detailed—I just need the big picture.”
2. ‍Irrelevant: “None of this information helps me with my current priorities.”
3. ‍Untrustworthy: “I can’t trust this data—I keep seeing inconsistencies.”
4. ‍Confusing: “I’m not sure how to interpret these charts.”
5. ‍Aimless: “I don’t know what to do with this information.”

Not surprisingly, I’ve heard these leadership frustrations throughout my analytics consulting career, and they persist today. They are more than just passing annoyances—they point to five critical gaps in business reporting that prevent organizations from becoming truly data-driven. Over the years, I’ve seen these gaps stall decision-making, waste resources, and erode executive confidence in data.

To help leaders and teams close these gaps, I developed the SPARK Reporting Framework—a simple but powerful tool that ensures business reporting isn’t just about data but about driving action with it.

These gaps aren't just technical problems—they’re missed chances to turn data into real business impact. When leaders can't quickly extract value from reporting, the entire organization suffers from strategic blind spots and delayed responses to market changes. Countless leaders feel like they’re drowning in information but still thirsty for insights.

SPARK covers the following five key factors:

• ‍Stakeholder: Understanding who will use the report and what they need‍
• Purpose: Clarifying why the report exists and how it connects to strategy‍
• Accuracy: Ensuring data quality, timeliness, and consistency‍
• Readability: Making information accessible through effective design‍
• Key Takeaway: Providing decision support and clear next steps

Each element directly addresses the common complaints I hear from leaders. Let's explore how the SPARK Reporting Framework can transform your reporting from frustrating busy work to invaluable business insight, starting with understanding your stakeholders.

1. Stakeholder = WHO the report is for

A crucial first step is understanding who the report is for. Tailoring the format, content, and delivery ensures the report speaks directly to the stakeholder’s needs. Failing to do this will result in either overwhelming detail or missing key information. It’s also important to avoid the trap of creating one-size-fits-all reports that rarely satisfy anyone’s needs.

• Interview the primary audience to better understand their needs
• Tailor the detail level appropriately (high-level summary vs. operational detail)
• Get feedback regularly to ensure reports are still meeting their needs

2. Purpose = WHY the report exists

Once the stakeholder is clear, you must define the report’s purpose. It should support a specific business goal or decision process. Without direction or strategic alignment, reports can quickly become noise, filled with irrelevant metrics that obscure rather than illuminate. With a clear purpose in mind, you have a valuable filter for relevance as it clarifies what data is essential and what is superfluous.

• Map each report component to specific business objectives
• Determine which business questions the report will help answer
• Audit your reports regularly to eliminate those without a clear purpose

3. Accuracy = HOW trustworthy and timely the data is

After defining what’s needed, ensure the data is timely and reliable. Inconsistencies or outdated figures can damage trust and potentially lead to poor decisions. While no data will ever be perfect, transparency and rigor in data handling are essential. If the data sources are unclear or questionable, they can also undermine how much your audience will trust the numbers.

• Implement necessary data validation checks before delivery
• Document the data sources, definitions, and calculation methods
• Establish a clear process for reporting and fixing data discrepancies

4. Readability = HOW clearly the report communicates

Good data can be obscured by poor design. Different design aspects—chart types, titles/headlines, visual hierarchy, and layout—influence how easy it is for stakeholders to navigate the report and access the key information they need. Reports must be scannable and easy for the audience to extract meaning. If they are difficult to read or interpret, stakeholders will disengage as the cognitive effort isn’t worth their time.

• Focus on one idea per chart to avoid overloading visuals
• Apply color strategically to highlight key data points
• Use headlines to explain, not just describe

5. Key Takeaway = WHAT insight or action the report drives

Beyond just understanding the data, stakeholders need help interpreting what matters most. To address this need, reports should offer clear takeaways in the form of context, interpretation, and explanation that can translate into recommendations and next steps. Rather than simply providing routine information, this support elevates managers’ ability to make more informed decisions. Even when the key takeaways lead to new questions, it moves the conversation forward.

• Summarize what matters most at the beginning or in callouts
• Use comparison values (vs. previous period, target, or benchmark)
• Tie data to potential outcomes (cost, revenue, risk, etc.)

Three major roadblocks SPARK helps overcome

While SPARK provides a useful roadmap for better reporting, it also exposes deeper challenges many organizations face in creating and delivering effective reporting. Let’s explore three common barriers most organizations face.

1. Insufficient reporting oversight

Unfortunately, reporting is often implemented with a 'set and forget' or 'rinse and repeat' approach. While continuity is essential in reporting, it can quickly become misaligned as strategic priorities shift or leadership changes. Without oversight, the value and impact of the reports can degrade.

To remain useful over time, reports must be updated to stay aligned with current stakeholder needs and managed to ensure data integrity doesn't break down. Organizations should regularly assess whether their reports are actually influencing decisions and driving business outcomes, not just whether they're being produced and delivered on schedule.

The first three elements of the SPARK Reporting Framework—Stakeholder, Purpose, and Accuracy—create a foundation for effective reporting by ensuring reports continually serve the right people, for the right reasons, with reliable information.

2. Imbalanced reporting skillsets

Many reporting issues stem from a common skill gap—organizations undervalue reporting expertise, treating it as a technical task rather than a strategic communication capability. Many technical report builders lack design or domain expertise that is necessary to enrich reporting beyond just providing descriptive information.

Aside from targeted training, addressing these gaps can often require a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach, combining technical, design, and domain knowledge to produce reports that truly drive impactful decisions.

The final two elements of SPARK Reporting Framework (Readability, Key Takeaways) highlight this skill gap and why organizations must act to close it. While technical staff may excel at extracting and organizing the data, they can lack the design sensibility to make reports visually accessible or the business acumen to identify and emphasize the most important takeaways for decision makers.

3. Overemphasis on automation

Many organizations have become overly focused on automating the entire reporting process, especially with the recent emergence of AI. While automation streamlines manual tasks, it can’t replace people who understand the audience, can apply relevant context, and connect the data to meaningful narratives that drive action.

Recently, I highlighted the concept of narrative reporting, which is distinct from traditional reporting. Most traditional reports provide descriptive information but lack context and interpretation. Narrative reports provide more clarity and meaning with annotations and commentary that executives crave. While AI can highlight key anomalies, patterns, and trends in the data, it cannot connect the dots and add meaning to the numbers like humans can.

The last element of the SPARK Reporting Framework (Key Takeaway) emphasizes why organizations cannot treat reporting as a purely technical exercise to be automated. If you remove humans entirely, you relinquish reports to being data dumps and not strategic communications that inform decisions.

Take your reporting to the next level with SPARK

As data volumes continue to grow and business complexity increases, the gap between information and understanding will only widen. When reports lack SPARK, they frustrate leaders and stall decision making. When the reports follow the SPARK Reporting Framework, they can ignite action.

By ensuring your reports are stakeholder-focused, purpose-driven, accurately-presented, easy-to-read, and action-oriented, you can transform reporting from an organizational obligation into a strategic activity that drives business value. In today's fast-moving business environment, SPARK-driven reporting empowers your leaders to gain a decision-making advantage over competitors who are likely still drowning in unfocused, overwhelming reports.

The SPARK Reporting Framework focuses specifically on optimizing one crucial element of your organization's data communication diet. For a more comprehensive view of how reporting fits into a balanced data communication strategy, explore my MyDataPlate model, which outlines the four essential categories of data communication that every organization needs.

Ready to bring SPARK to your reporting?

‍If your organization struggles with reporting that frustrates more than it informs, I can help. I’ve worked with several organizations and business leaders to help audit and improve their business reporting practices. Whether you need guidance in applying the SPARK Reporting Framework or want to transform your reporting into a strategic asset, feel free to reach out. Let’s work together to ignite decision-making in your business.

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