A practical checklist for reporting latency
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Run through this the next time reporting latency comes up.
Most data problems are ownership problems that turned into technical ones. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
The checklist
- Decide how fresh reports genuinely need to be
- Real-time costs several times more than hourly
- Most decisions do not need same-minute data
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
Why it matters
Decide how fresh reports genuinely need to be. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
How to tell if yours is fine
Numbers get quoted in meetings long after anyone remembers how they were calculated. Three things worth confirming about reporting latency before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Decide how fresh reports genuinely need to be — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.