Most UKG People Analytics environments do not become disorganized overnight. Someone needs a payroll report, so a developer creates one. Six months later, someone needs something similar and creates another. A report gets copied because nobody wants to risk changing the original. An employee leaves, but schedules created under their account remain. A project ends, but its temporary reports stay in production. Before long, names like Final, New Version, Copy, and Report 2 start appearing. Nothing is necessarily “broken but an environment that isn’t properly managed has other costs that add up over time.
We recently completed a UKG People Analytics governance project for a large organization that had accumulated 1,190 reporting objects, including 1,129 reports and 47 agents. The environment also contained 267 scheduled reports, including 55 disabled schedules. More importantly, when we compared the reporting inventory against available execution history, 606 reports had no executions during the measured period, and 895 had been executed ten times or fewer. Those numbers don’t automatically mean 895 reports should be deleted. They mean 895 reports deserve a question: Do we still need this?
The Hidden Cost of an Unmanaged UKG Environment
Most organizations understand the cost of developing a report. What is less obvious is that a report continues costing the organization long after development is complete. Suppose someone requests a report that already exists, but neither the user nor developer can find it. The organization pays to develop it again. Now there are two reports solving essentially the same problem. Both may eventually require troubleshooting, testing after system changes, documentation, security reviews and modifications. The cost of the original governance problem has compounded.
Our governance standards recommend checking whether an existing report can satisfy at least 80% of a new requirement before creating another one. When it can, enhancing the existing report is generally preferable to creating another copy.
Development Cost Is Only the Beginning
Poor governance creates costs that rarely appear as a line item called “bad report management.” They appear as wasted developer hours, wasted employee hours trying to find the right report, and potentially costly business decisions in the event there are multiple reports and not all of them are accurate. Every time HRIS spends 30 minutes figuring out which of four similarly named reports is correct. Every time an Analyst uses the wrong report as a template. Every time a Developer modifies the wrong version. Every time someone rebuilds logic that already exists somewhere else. Every time there is an audit, upgrade, and security review when nobody knows why a report exists, who owns it or what business process depends on it. They also appear as risk. If two reports answer the same business question differently, which number is correct?
A well-governed reporting library improves discoverability, reduces duplicate development, preserves institutional knowledge and makes audits, upgrades, security reviews and business-process changes easier to support.
You Can’t Govern What You Don’t Know You Have
Our first challenge was deceptively simple:
What is actually in the environment?
Anyone who has administered a mature Cognos environment knows that answering that question isn’t always as straightforward as it sounds. So we created an inventory. The resulting catalog documented the reporting environment and organized the information into an executive summary, object inventory, schedules, folder structure and activity information. We then combined several sources of evidence rather than relying on a single snapshot. This is also where newer AI technology became surprisingly useful.
Using AI to Turn Screens into Data
Some of the information we needed was visible through the application but wasn’t conveniently available as a structured dataset. Historically, that can turn an inventory exercise into hours of manual transcription. Instead, we captured the relevant screens and used AI-assisted image-to-text extraction to convert the visible information into structured text that could be organized and analyzed. AI wasn’t making decisions about which reports were good or bad. It was eliminating clerical work.
That’s an important distinction. One of the best uses of AI in enterprise systems today isn’t asking it to replace subject-matter expertise. It’s using it to turn information that is difficult to work with into information that can be analyzed. Once we had structured data, traditional analytics could do what traditional analytics does extremely well: compare, count, categorize and identify exceptions.
Then We Asked UKG What Was Actually Being Used
An inventory tells you what exists. It doesn’t tell you what matters. For that, we incorporated reporting supplied through UKG Support that provided information about schedules and report execution activity.We could now compare three different perspectives:
What exists → What is scheduled → What is actually being run
That changes the conversation dramatically. A report sitting in a folder might look obsolete until you discover an important process runs it every morning. Conversely, a beautifully developed report with a complicated name and extensive logic may look important—but if nobody has executed it in months, it deserves investigation. This is why we don’t recommend blindly deleting reports based on activity. Instead, activity becomes evidence for a governance decision.
The Numbers Tell You Where to Look
In this particular assessment, the numbers were striking. Of the 1,190 objects cataloged, the inventory contained 1,129 reports. The activity analysis identified 606 reports with zero executions in the measured activity data. Expand the threshold to reports executed ten times or fewer and the number reached 895. Again, that doesn’t mean delete 895 reports.
A year-end compliance report may only run once per year and be extremely important. An audit report may exist specifically for an uncommon event. A temporary implementation report may appropriately sit unused after go-live. Usage tells you where to investigate, not what decision to make. That is where human governance comes back into the process.
Schedules Create a Different Kind of Risk
Scheduled reports deserve special attention. In UKG BI, schedules can be associated with the account that created them rather than simply being managed as a property of the report. That can create continuity problems when employees leave, transfer responsibilities or have accounts disabled. Our governance recommendation is therefore to use a dedicated service account for production schedules and periodically validate the owner, frequency, delivery method, format and recipients.
Our inventory identified 267 scheduled reports.
That means governance isn’t merely about cleaning up folders. Scheduled output can contain employee, payroll, benefit or other sensitive information. A report that nobody remembers may still be quietly distributing information to a recipient list established years ago. That turns housekeeping into data governance and security.
The Goal Isn’t to Delete Reports
This is where cleanup projects sometimes go wrong. Someone sees hundreds of reports and declares: “We need to delete all this junk.” That’s dangerous. A better model is lifecycle management:
Development → Testing → Production → Deprecated → Archived → Retired
Our governance approach recommends archiving questionable reports rather than immediately deleting them. If nobody requests the archived report during the retention period, it can then be considered for permanent retirement. The objective isn’t to have the fewest reports possible.
The objective is to know:
What do we have?
Who owns it?
Why does it exist?
Is it accurate?
Who receives it?
Is it still being used?
And when should it be retired?
Naming and Organization Matter More Than They Seem
Governance doesn’t have to be complicated. Something as mundane as a naming convention can prevent real costs.
Instead of:
Payroll Report Final2
use names that begin with the business object and progressively describe their purpose:
Payroll Register
Payroll Register – Weekly
Payroll Register – Historical
The same principle applies to folders. Organize around business areas such as Payroll, Benefits, Recruiting, Finance, HRIS, Compliance and Audit—not around the person who happened to build the report.
Why?
Because Anthony may leave. Payroll probably won’t.
Good architecture survives the people who created it.
Governance Is Cheaper Than Cleanup
The irony of reporting governance is that it feels unnecessary when an environment is small. That’s exactly when it’s cheapest to implement. By the time an organization has hundreds or thousands of reports, figuring out what everything does becomes a project of its own. A simple governance program can prevent that.
Every production report should have an owner, a purpose, a useful description, an appropriate location, validated recipients and a defined lifecycle. Scheduled reports should be reviewed, duplicates consolidated and obsolete content archived. And this shouldn’t be a one-time cleanup exercise.
Our governance guide recommends reviewing the reporting environment at least annually, asking each business area who uses each report, how often it’s used, what decision it supports, whether it can be replaced and whether it should be archived.
AI Changes the Economics of Governance
There’s one more lesson from this project that I think matters. Historically, cataloging a large reporting environment could require an enormous amount of tedious manual work. That expense made organizations more likely to postpone the project—which allowed the environment to become even more complicated.
AI changes some of those economics.
We can now combine AI-assisted extraction with traditional analytics, UKG-generated activity information and human subject-matter expertise to inventory and analyze environments far more efficiently than was practical in the past. AI didn’t replace the UKG consultant. It replaced a lot of copying and pasting. I’ll happily take that trade.
Start by Knowing What You Have
If your UKG People Analytics environment has been operating for years and nobody can confidently explain what all the reports do, that’s not unusual. But it shouldn’t remain that way. Treat reports as organizational assets rather than files. Give them owners. Document their purpose. Measure their usage. Review their schedules. Consolidate duplication. Archive what is no longer needed.
Most importantly, establish governance after the cleanup, or you’ll eventually find yourself doing the same project again. To help organizations get started, we’re making two of the resources from this approach available as free downloads:
UKG BI Report Governance Guide — a practical framework for report ownership, naming, descriptions, folders, development, scheduling, annual review, lifecycle management and archiving.
UKG Report Catalog Template — an example of how a reporting environment can be inventoried and analyzed, including an executive summary, object inventory, schedules, folder structure and report activity.
The goal isn’t to sell you another tool.
It’s to help you understand and manage the tools you already have.
