The profession “consultant”, to which I belong, sometimes feels suspected of a cliché, especially to use so-called “buzzwords” or even to coin them in the first place. However, I don’t know exactly who created the term “real time”, which is by the way even defined in a German industry standard. If you browse through the past, you may get the impression that IT providers, customers and consultants have been hunting for real time in reporting together, especially since the 1970s.
But why is the term “real-time” still so omnipresent as an objective of projects and new products? After all, it implies quite logically that real time has not yet been implemented in many places in the various reports.
There are, of course, good reasons why many reporting solutions, especially in complex organizations, still do not provide up-to-date data “always at the push of a button” (to give the term “real-time” a pragmatic, experimental description). M&A activities, for example, bring new data sources, structures and characteristics, new systems and “differently designed processes” into the companies and would first have to be integrated and harmonized for a then group-wide “truly real real-time reporting”. In the case of ERP systems, this often takes many years, and in some cases true homogenization is not achieved completely even then. This raises the question of whether true “immediate reporting” should really be a top goal for companies with a strategy of inorganic growth.
At the same time, new data sources are emerging, especially along the value chain, from the use of the many new technical possibilities that are often subsumed under “digitisation”. In the sense of “experimenting with new technical possibilities”, it may well make sense to integrate new data into existing “real-time data streams” at a later stage. The so-called “Data Lake” is a tool that is now often used as an alternative to classical, structured data warehouses.
Modern reporting also makes use of a variety of data types that are currently not automatically generated. This concerns, for example, future-oriented figures for planning and forecasting. Also qualitative, human-written comments and corporate action proposals must first be thought of. This means that a whole range of information flows into reports, which must first be compiled.
Finally, there are also purely quantitative reporting occasions where, to date, Robotics & Co have not replaced humans and will not replace them so quickly. These are, for example, consolidated financial statements for capital market reporting, in the course of which manual corrections and other postings are carried out over a period of time that is typically still days.
Back to the critical appraisal of the term “real-time”: time is indeed relative, as we know today. But can time even be “fake”? Moreover: “real-time” as a term offers the nice possibility to suggest “very fast”. This, however, without specifying how fast it will really be in the target state. This is exactly what the standard mentioned at the beginning of this article demands.
