A supplier quoted us a substantial figure to move our reporting estate onto a new platform, priced per report. That quotation was the first time anybody had counted them. Six hundred and forty scheduled reports, produced by four different tools, delivered by email or dropped onto a shared drive on a timetable going back years.
Before agreeing to pay for the move, we measured what happened to them. Across a quarter, ninety-four were opened by a human being. Several of the rest went to distribution lists whose membership had not been revised since the list was created, and two of those lists contained nobody who still worked for us.
Reports accumulate because requesting one is free and cancelling one requires a person to admit they no longer need something they once asked for. In eleven years I have never received a request to decommission a report. Not one.
The cost is not the storage, which is trivial. Two analysts spent a meaningful part of their week keeping this estate alive: repointing extracts after every system upgrade, correcting formatting, chasing failures at half past six in the morning for output nobody would look at. Each report is also an extract, which means a copy of data leaving a system with controls and landing in a mailbox or a folder with different ones, and about forty of them contained salary or customer detail sent to groups that could no longer justify receiving it.
We asked every recipient to confirm what they still wanted, and we sent the request as a renewal rather than a review, so silence meant the report stopped. Four hundred and twenty stopped. Nineteen of those produced a complaint, all of which we reinstated the same day and which turned out to be the genuinely useful ones.
Everything surviving now has a named owner, an expiry date no more than a year away and a recorded reason. Usage is measured and reported back to the owners. Regulatory output is tagged separately and exempt, because a handful of things nobody reads must still be produced and that is a perfectly good answer.
We did eventually buy the new platform. It cost a third of the original quotation, and the saving came entirely from deciding what not to take with us.
– Serguey Shinder
