Business Intelligence Reporting:
The business value of reporting is simple: it communicates and helps you understand your company's performance. It leads you to take action on recent information. It creates a common context for decision-making across every department and at every level. At its best, reporting is an integral part of performance management.
IT departments can be challenged in delivering these simple values to a wide variety of users with different needs, and from a wide variety of different data sources. The limitations of reporting technology, such as its traditional inability to address these requirements in concert, prevents the much-discussed but seldom delivered 'single view of the truth' modern organizations need.
As a stopgap solution, many companies use separate reporting tools for different capabilities and styles of reporting. The reporting tool is often dictated by the structure of the underlying data. Different metadata structures and data architectures make it hard for IT to ensure data consistency. Maintaining multiple reporting applications means a higher total cost of ownership (TCO). Vendor-specific security models limit scalability and network performance. Each reporting application has its own performance limits, which forces networks to work at the lowest common denominator. This means other enterprise components such as ERP systems, databases, or application servers aren't being used to their full value. End-users need to switch back and forth among applications to answer a single question. IT struggles with a constant backlog of requests for new and modified reports because most reporting solutions have an all or nothing approach to functionality, or because they don't allow business users to create or modify reports themselves. Addressing these challenges has been anything but simple.
The business perspective
For business users, the right reporting software is simply the solution that lets them work with information the way they want to. It means accessing relevant information is fast and easy. You are confident that the numbers you see are the same throughout the organization. The reports you receive are presented in context so you can make informed decisions rather than lose time debating what action to take.
Teamwork is a regular part of solving business problems; reporting software must let people collaborate and share information at any stage of the reporting lifecycle. Teams are composed of workers with different roles and abilities; business users need a reporting interface that reflects their needs rather than a generic one for highly technical users. The right reporting software for business people removes the limits to fact-based, better business decisions.
The view from the server room
Adding to the existing enterprise reporting pressures on IT is the requirement to cut spending. According to CIO Magazine's 2004 "State of the CIO" survey, IT's impact on an organization is to reduce the cost of doing business through efficiency gains and increased productivity. Cost cutting remains the major focus for CIOs. These conclusions were reached in a year when the average IT budget fell from 6.3 percent to 5.6. percent of total revenue1. IT departments are being told to do more for their organizations with less. Fortunately, the barriers to efficient enterprise reporting also point to the solution. To reduce their total cost of ownership, organizations can benefit from a single reporting software application that reduces the complexity of the reporting environment for IT while delivering more for the organization's business users. A complete reporting solution needs to:
- Recognize and accommodate different kinds of users.
- Provide complete coverage for all types of reports.
- Access all enterprise data, regardless of the source.
- Provide intuitive search capabilities that quickly bring relevant BI information to the user.
In 2003 Cognos introduced new BI reporting software, Cognos ReportNet, built on a Web services-based architecture. The open, modern architecture of ReportNet was its key innovation, and key to its value for both business users and IT. ReportNet bridges the worlds of pixel-perfect production reporting and highly flexible business reporting. It promises and delivers a single product for all reporting requirements, with simplified deployment, maintenance, and integration; drag-and-drop ease of use; multilingual reporting; and many other innovations.
