Management needs an actionable summary view into all the data that is collected. Often these are reports or dashboards that display key business attributes, major positions, risks, etc.
On a small scale, such tasks may be accomplished by Excel. Management can cut & paste previous quarter numbers into Excel, apply regression or some other projection and
get a prediction of what next quarter numbers may look like. They can also play what-if games by adjusting cell values with educated guesses to get (perhaps actionable) results.
Once things get beyond a certain point, it is not practical to aggregate such data in a desktop application, much less to run models in that environment.
Within bigger enterprises, reports and dashboards are created to present key business metrics in a way that enables management to quickly grasp what is happening. Each report or dashboard may highlight a particular perspective of the business—and may be built and consumed independently of other reports.
