Among the activity categories that are most strongly associated with data consumption, reviewing is the most passive. By definition, “reviewing” implies looking back on events that have already occurred in the past. Most traditional forms of reporting are examples of the Review category. Profit and Loss, Changes in Cash Flow, Balance Sheets – all entail looking passively at static data.
In most traditional business firms, review is the first step in a cyclical management process. It goes something like this. Management from the top down reviews quarterly or annual results. This review process typically triggers inquiries about how or why results occurred (or didn’t). The inquiries are then passed to knowledge workers who interact with data in more dynamic ways (as we’ll discuss later) in order to provide answers to the queries.
I was tempted to call this category the “report” category. It’s true that all the examples I cited a couple of paragraphs ago are traditional reports. But I resisted the impulse because I wanted the model to be activity based, and a report is more appropriately considered as the object of the “review” activity than as an activity in itself. And it’s also possible that the object of a review could be something other than a report, although nothing else comes immediately to mind.
Next Topic: Investigate
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