You spend a lot of time on the first half of your application – collecting and validating data, formatting it, updating your databases with it. But how does the other half of your application work? That is, everything you do to report against your data? At Izenda, we call this “the Reporting Problem.”
It’s a problem that has always existed. Application developers focus on things like user experience, business rules, database design, SQL. Reporting is usually an end-of-project deliverable assigned to less experienced developers, with little or no input from users. In that way, it is like database backup or documentation. They are important tasks but tend to lose out to other priorities in the march towards production.
Often, the end result is that end users get static reports that don’t necessarily meet their needs. And because building self-service into a reporting system is a significant undertaking, development teams often end up maintaining reporting for the life of the application. An organization may also end up saddled with costly legacy reporting tools like SSRS or Crystal. These tools don’t scale well and don’t offer self-service.
Homegrown solutions built with developer toolsets are another less than ideal solution for these same reasons.
There are many reasons why embedding a third-party BI platform in your application is better:
You are saving time. It takes a minimum of two years to build a self-service analytics platform from scratch. We know this since we have done it – and we had our entire development effort devoted to it.
You are saving money. Estimate paying 40 – 50 developers over two years to code a homegrown solution. Not only is buying a solution cheaper, but you will also get a more complete BI platform.
You are extending your customization options. When you develop an application in-house, including options for customizing by third parties is not a high priority. That can make things easier in terms of faster development time and even a more familiar UX for your organization’s users. However, this fails once you need to extend analytics to partners outside your organization or try to monetize your offering. If you haven’t baked customizability into your analytics, you can’t extend it to other types of users, even as analytics becomes more democratized across organizations.
You have a solution that is tested. In fact, it is vetted by tens or hundreds of thousands of users across the entire spectrum of businesses that ISVs and companies serve. You cannot test your own solution on this scale. A thirdrd-party solution has been put to the test against some of the most strenuous and strict security and functional standards and requirements.
You free developers from supporting analytics. And you free data scientists (if you have them) from operational report creation. In both cases, these are expensive technical personnel who are more valuable to your organization in other functions.
You add value to your application. By empowering end users to create the analytics they need, you make your application more critical and more relevant to their daily work. You don’t have to force end users to log into a different system to perform analytics, or to use a desktop computer to create reports – all the functionality is seamlessly integrated with your application.
Sometimes the reporting end of an application doesn’t get the attention it warrants. That’s a shame because reporting is a great way to show users the value of their data, and to increase their investment in your application. That’s what Izenda is here for.
