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. You may deliver reports on paper or electronically, either as attachments to email messages or via an Internet browser inquiry. Reports usually represent the logical end of a business process. On the other hand, notifications occur as the result of an event. The event may be a system event, such as the addition or failure of a component, or a business event, such as the posting of a particular transaction.