True “Self-Service” ad-hoc Reporting
Just true self-service ad-hoc canceling would put business intelligence reporting in the hands of end users.
For some businesses, there are large amount of data collected from various software applications and stored in relational databases and also other type of structured data sources. There is a gold mine of information waiting to remain explored and analyzed to aid the executives and their own staff understands their business, their own customers, and also the market place better, and gains a competitive gain. The way to explore and analyze the information is usually through reporting software.
Within an usual report development process, the market end user conveys the requirements to business analyst, and undergoes an iterative process to get the requirements clarified and finished. The market analyst writes the options document and sends this document to development company. That gets scheduled and assigned to a report programmer. That report gets developed good specification, QA checks it, and the report is released to the business user. It’s a lengthy process and the user may need to wait months to make use of the report.
Other than using static reports definitely programmed, it’s difficult for business end users to perform business learning ability data mining without utilizing the help of programmers. The needs to perform the data mining tasks can be urgent and the requirements can be changing, thus there is a great need to enable business users to perform data mining on their own through ad-hoc reporting.
But most of the ad-hoc reporting implementation are generally limited in functionality and difficult to use. These software use a lot of database terminologies and require the users to learn database structures and relationships. Business end users shouldn’t have time for weeks of training, nor do they would like to become programmers. The only way to make ad-hoc reporting help the end users is actually making ad-hoc reporting truly self-service.
However, the vast majority of self-service, and “guided” ad-hoc reporting software on the market still require report programmers to brew a list of data fields available according to a specification, and then the business user can choose from this list of fields to create an ad-hoc report. The user is confined by what are distributed around them. In the event the reporting need is outside of what’s supported by the predefined listing of fields and the predefined functionality, than the task has to go through the development cycle ever again. This isn’t true “self-service”.
For ad-hoc reporting software to remain truly “self-service”, it needs to be intelligent. It needs so as to understand the company’s info model, data and business. It needs so as to understand the reporting need, map the reporting requirement on the database, and retrieve the relevant and correct data. It will need to have the knowledge and know-how of an reporting programmer, and also communicate to and interact with the users effectively with real-time. It needs to be straight-forward and easy-to-use so users are capable of doing ad-hoc reporting from scratch by themselves. Only such a reporting software would enable end-users to develop true ad-hoc reports in minutes, and explore and analyze the data to service the transforming business needs. Only such a reporting software would really put business intelligence reporting inside hands of the end-users when it belongs.
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