Imagine you are a general commanding a complex battle with many fronts involving many different combat arms. Ideally, you would want both, but in reality you can only expect to get the sit-reps.
Business managers are in exactly the same position.
Most of their business management applications can only deliver reports, not realtime notifications of significant business events. The good news, however, is that more sophisticated technology and the recognition of the potential of notification systems are prompting more vendors to add this functionality to their applications. To understand the role of notifications, let's start by defining the role of the traditional report. Reports are by definition a collection of information within a particular information domain. One of the benefits of a report is the contextual richness that it supplies to the reader.