Most businesses do not have a shortage of data.
Finance systems, CRM platforms, spreadsheets, workplace technology, print and document environments, IT services, and business processes generate information every day.
The key question is whether that information helps people understand what is happening and decide what to do next.
The UK Business Data Survey 2026 found that 86% of UK businesses handle digitised data. Yet among businesses handling digitised data, only 25% said they analyse it to generate new insights or knowledge.
That does not mean every organisation needs a sophisticated analytics strategy.
It does highlight an important distinction between having information and using it effectively.
For many businesses, the opportunity may therefore be less about collecting more data and more about making better use of what they already have.
How can businesses make better use of their data?
A good starting point is to identify the business decision first, then work backwards to understand what information it needs.
That means:
- Define what you are trying to understand or decide
- Identify the information required
- Understand where that information currently exists
- Look for manual work, duplication or delays in getting it to the right person
- Present the important information clearly
- Decide what action should follow
Technology can help at several stages, but it should support the requirement rather than define it.
Start with the decision, not the dashboard
When organisations want better reporting or visibility, the conversation can quickly turn to technology.
Do we need a dashboard?
Should we be using Power BI?
Can we connect more of our systems?
Those may eventually be the right questions. But they are not where we would start.
Instead, define the decision first.
Ask:
“What are we trying to understand?”
Then:
“What decision will that information help us make?”
A Finance Director investigating an unexpected cost increase has different requirements than an Operations Manager trying to understand performance across several locations.
An IT Manager looking for recurring service issues needs something different again.
Once the business question is clear, work backwards:
Decision → Information required → Where it exists → How it reaches the decision-maker → What happens next
This is a more useful starting point than deciding the business needs another dashboard and then looking for information to put on it.
What is information friction?
Information friction occurs when the data required to understand something exists, but accessing, preparing or interpreting it takes unnecessary time or effort.
Imagine an Operations Director wants to understand why performance has changed across several locations.
How quickly can they get an answer?
The data may exist, but gaining insight is still difficult if someone must download it from multiple systems, update spreadsheets, chase missing figures and compile a report manually.
Information friction can show up in relatively ordinary ways:
- reports that take hours to prepare every month
- information being copied manually between systems or spreadsheets
- different departments working from different versions of the same figures
- useful information being available, but only a few people knowing where to find it
- operational data being collected but rarely reviewed
- reports containing plenty of numbers without showing what requires attention
None of these automatically means the organisation needs new technology.
But they are good reasons to investigate whether you can use information more effectively.
Look at the information your business already has
Businesses can sometimes look for a new reporting solution before understanding what their existing technology and services already tell them.
That can mean useful information is overlooked.
Take Managed Print & Document Services.
A managed print environment can provide greater visibility of print activity, device utilisation and service requirements. That information can help an organisation understand how it uses its print environment and inform decisions about ongoing management and optimisation.
The same principle applies elsewhere.
An IT environment can generate operational and service information.
A workflow can show where information is being repeatedly handled or where unnecessary manual activity occurs.
Business applications can contain financial, customer and operational information.
The objective is not to put every available piece of information into one enormous dashboard.
The better question is:
“Which information would help us answer the business question we started with?”
Simplify your reporting before adding more technology
Once you understand the requirement, look at the journey the information takes.
Where does it originate?
Who prepares it?
What happens to it before it reaches the person who needs it?
This can reveal surprisingly simple opportunities for improvement.
A report may contain information nobody uses.
Two teams may be producing similar reports independently.
A spreadsheet may exist to bridge two stages of a process.
Someone may be manually compiling information that is already available elsewhere.
Or the reporting may be perfectly adequate, but the organisation has never agreed what should happen when an exception appears.
Before adding another platform, consider four questions:
- Can we remove anything?
- Can we simplify anything?
- Can we make existing information easier to access or understand?
- Only then is additional technology required?
That order matters.
How can technology improve business reporting?
Once the requirement is clear, technology can help organisations bring relevant information together, reduce manual reporting activity and make important information easier to understand.
For some requirements, an existing report may be sufficient.
In other situations, business intelligence technology may be appropriate.
For example, Microsoft Power BI can connect to different data sources and turn data into interactive visual reports. For organisations with broader data and analytics requirements, Microsoft Fabric provides a platform that supports data ingestion, transformation, analytics, and reporting.
But the technology should follow the requirement.
A dashboard with dozens of metrics isn’t necessarily more useful than a simple report that shows the five things a decision-maker genuinely needs to know.
The test is not how sophisticated the reporting looks.
It is whether someone can use it to answer:
- What’s happening?
- Why does it matter?
- What needs my attention?
- What should we do next?
- How do you turn business data into better decisions?
A useful way to approach the process is:
Connect → Simplify → Visualise → Understand → Act
Connect the right information to the question you are trying to answer.
Simplify unnecessary manual work, duplication and reporting complexity.
Visualise the information in a way that makes important changes or exceptions easier to see.
Understand what it tells you about performance, costs, processes, risks or opportunities.
Act on what you have learned.
That final stage is easily overlooked.
A business can invest considerable time creating reports and dashboards without changing a single decision as a result.
Better reporting isn’t the end goal. The value comes from knowing what to do next.
Five questions to improve how your business uses data
You do not need to begin with a major data project.
Choose one important report, operational question or management decision and ask:
1. What decision are we trying to make?
Be specific. Avoid starting with “we need better reporting”.
2. What information do we actually need?
Separate useful information from data that is simply available.
3. Where does that information come from today?
Identify the systems, spreadsheets, services and people involved.
4. What effort is required before somebody can use it?
Look for manual work, duplication, delays and unnecessary complexity.
5. What happens when the information tells us something needs attention?
If there is no clear answer, improving the dashboard alone may not solve the problem.
Working through those five questions can tell you considerably more about the real requirement before you consider changing the technology.
Do businesses need more data to make better decisions?
Not necessarily.
First, understand whether the required information already exists and whether the problem is access, reporting, visibility, or process.
As businesses set future priorities, it helps to review existing information before deciding what to invest in next.
Ask:
- What is costing more than expected?
- Where are people spending unnecessary time?
- Which services, devices or processes are not working as effectively as they could?
- Where is useful information difficult to access?
- Which decisions take longer than they should because the right information isn’t readily available?
The answer may not be more data.
It may be a clearer view of what you already have.
At Pinnacle, we start by understanding the business question, the information available and the processes and technology surrounding it. From there, we can help identify where greater visibility, simpler processes or different technology could make a meaningful difference.
If there is something in your organisation you need to understand more clearly, start with the decision you are trying to make. Then look at whether your information is helping you make it.