The Troubled World of Reporting
Imagine that your organization has only a single person who knows how to send email. Every time anyone needs to send a message, a request is added to the company Email Request System, where it is prioritized and put into a queue consisting of many other emails waiting to be composed and sent. While the email guru knows a lot about sending an email, it is not known when the message might actually be sent, especially if higher priority message requests come alongand reduce the queue position of your message request. Because the organization accepts that this is the best possible way to handle this process,everyone accepts the inevitably long waits and uncertainties as the “cost of doing business.”
Sounds like a real nightmare, doesn’t it? But this scenario is a metaphor for the state of information reporting today. Even the latest crop of reporting and business intelligence (BI) tools require the heavy involvement of expensive and overworked software integrators, developers and database specialists. If you want a report changed, even for something as simple as replacing a column, you’ve got to call the programming department or the SQL expert. It’s like having to use a web developer to make a spelling change on a web site. And that’s for well-defined, relatively static reporting functions.
