William Li's Enterprise Reporting : Concepts and Terms

“ARRA” Challenges in Today’s Enterprise Reporting

williaml — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:14:00 GMT

For a long time, Reporting to most of organizations is known as “second tier” priority compare to “first tier” online transaction systems. This is still somewhat true in today’s business environment. However, Enterprise reporting is becoming increasingly critical in terms of the roles it plays in enterprise decision marking. It is not unusual that companies spend more time and money investing in Enterprise Reporting than online transaction systems. In some organizations, Reporting is equally or more important than online transaction systems.

Normally, A reporting system is built on top of a throughout understanding organzation's business needs, data model and daily information flows. However, to play the key roles in information decision making and maintain high level of organizational function for long period of time, there are new challenges have been emerging for Enterprise Reporting solution developers to consider, which I call it ARRA challenges,

Agile Construction – Ability to deliver enterprise reporting solution incrementally through quick cycles and iterative approaches to avoid investing one big bet upfront. In fact, most of those big bet failed miserably because of the changing nature of enterprise business information and data. Today, Reporting solutions in enterprise need more adaptability compare to online transaction system. The traditional ways of developing Reporting solutions typically have a few well-known problems - big upfront cost, long development time and stable business information flow. Agile approach will allow enterprises to enter into a healthy build-and-use, rebuild-and-reuse cycles. Partial but early production allows enterprise information workers’ feedback and adjustment be built in to the solutions.

Rapid Development and Deployment – Today’s organization can not wait for the traditional waterfall cycles of writing reporting requirement, having developers to design reports, testers to QA and operation to deploy them to production. Business just does not have time time or the “spec” that IT teams are looking. Instead, users are demanding rapid development and deployment for reports. Many ad-hoc reports are just “ideas” or “try-and-see” type of information analysis for business users. They are keen to leverage a rapid development and deployment reporting infrastructure to probe new findings of enterprise data in order to provide more adaptive data analysis and consumptions cycles.

Real-Time Reporting – Another tradition in Reporting solution is that data and information provided norally are not near-real-time. 24 Hours or even longer delay in data refresh cycles are very usual solution due to the problems of conflicting resources utilization between instantaneous online transaction system needs and complex aggregation reporting queries. However, today’s enterprise is driven by fast cycle of information decisions. Reporting architect and designers need to invest in solutions that bring enterprises information and data more quickly and timely in front of decision makers.

Availability – when mentioning high availability and 24*7, people will think immediately for online transactional system. However, in today’s increasing complex enterprise business environment, data needs to be available any time around the clock and globally. This is becoming more and more important to create and maintain enterprise wide competitiveness. You may slowly notice that your enterprise information workers are demanding the high availability of Enterprise Reporting system just like in the past of online transaction system.

It is still not easy to build an Enterprise Reporting solution to meet the above needs. However, I believe the trend is inevitable. Is your system ready for Enterprise Reporting?

Different Types of Enterprise Reporting Needs

williaml — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 11:07:00 GMT

Most of organizations might be using different type of data reporting for these business needs but there are a lot of similarities too. Here are the various types of Enterprise Reporting I have collected so far:

List Reporting – The most common usage of Enterprise Reporting is the formatted displays or presentations of organizational data lists through list, text, graphics or other rendering formats for periodic business operation. Various levels of itemized rows and aggregated summaries are typically used in List Reporting. Data rows and summaries might be assembled from one or more than one functional discipline areas within the enterprises.

Interactive Analysis – Enterprise users needs to perform analysis upon large set of data to understand or find presentation of the data. These analysis typically are interactive and allow users to directly select dimensions (location, department, time, etc) to compare measurements (sales growth, cost distributions, amount etc). The interactive analysis requires data readily available when different dimentions, measurement are chosen so typically data are pre-calculated or aggregated using specific data model like OLAP.

Ad-hoc Querying - Ability to allow advanced business users for ad-hoc data needs and play "what-if" scenarios to determine what are the best use of enterprise data. Most of time it involves Excel or other front-end easy tools for those users to analysis or querying data.

Metric Management - In many organizations, business performance is managed and measured through outcome-oriented metrics. These metrics are agreed measurement to track and compare the business performance over a period of time. Within the organization, these are mostly called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). For external organizations, they are Service Level Agreement (SLAs).

Dashboard - Another way for enterprise to consume their reporting data is publishing them into customized dashboard views, mostly hosted within enterprises’ internet portal. These dashboards might use graphic to mimic color-coded auto dashboard indicator for easy but grand overview of enterprise’s key performance.

Balance Scorecards - A method attempts to present an integrated view of success in an organization. In addition to financial performance, they also include customer, business process and learning and growth perspectives.

Data Mining - When enterprise holds large amount of data, many of them started to analysis using Data Mining technique neural networks and machine learning to study and find potential common patterns in the data. Most of the data mining takes time and dimensions into account to try to predict or forecast the learning.

What's Enterprise Reporting and Why do I care?

williaml — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 04:31:00 GMT

There are many definitions for Enterprise Reporting from the Internet. To focus on the topic in this blog, my definition is,

Enterprise Reporting is the capability for a corporation to enable information workers provide data and analysis to decision makers quickly and cost effectively by leveraging information available throughout and outside the enterprise.

Every organization is probably doing some sort of Enterprise Reporting today by using technology in-house or existing commerical solutions. Different solutions might provide very different functionalities or need for the enterprise. The areas could differentiate one solution from others are,

Capability: which level of capability is your solution providing? Can this capability be scalable with the information growth? Or when the company grows?
Quickly: how fast can your solution make the data and information available to decision maker?
Cost: does it require high cost to implement your enterprise reporting? Can the solution adapt to the changing business environment and still with cost effectiveness?
Enterprise Data: is your solution only providing data and information for a core product or it links cross-functional data?
Outside the Enterprise: does your solution integrate with external partners or suppliers or customers' data?
Operational: is your solution easy to deploy and maintain in the enterprise? Does it have high availability, secure and other operational attributes?

SQL Server 2005 has provided a very powerful overall solution to address many of the areas/topics listed above. That is the key reason why we choose it to implement our solution. In the coming blog, I'll discuss more details and present you a generic infrastructure framework built by SQL 2005 products and technologies. Re-using this framework for Enterprise Reporting could save $$$ and time. Hope you enjoy the reading and can share some comments or feedback.