Getting IT out of the report writing business
The creation and maintenance of Analytical Reporting has long been the bane of IT and with good reason. Reporting is necessarily reactive to the business, end users are often unsure of what they really need (or currently have for that matter) and increasing data complexity makes it time and labor intensive. This makes reporting nearly impossible to forecast from a budget or resource perspective.
In the last few years, both existing and new reporting/analytic tools have become much more user friendly. True user self-service is now a reality across the spectrum of price points. At the high end of the spectrum MicroStrategy, Business Objects and Cognos are still getting stronger, especially on their analytics capabilities. What is truly remarkable are the features found in what might be labeled midmarket products. Tableau, Qlikview, Pentaho Enterprise and Jaspersoft Enterprise all over very strong user self service at entry-level price points. While each has its strengths, all are potentially viable tools for the large enterprise.
Leading the horse to water
In our experience, most business organizations respond positively to the self-service concept. Sticking points with the business usually involve either the budget or availability of the expertise necessary to take on self-service. The sticking point with IT is building a consistent and reliable infrastructure foundation for self-service.
Data governance is key to making self-service a reality. By data governance we simple mean data accuracy and integrity. While each business has a unique set of issues, users need to be notified if upstream processes have failed. Another crucial aspect of governance is data quality. It is difficult and prohibitively expensive to fix upstream data quality processes in the analytics layer. Data quality needs to be addressed where the quality problem is created. As data is added the business and IT need to revisit the environment to ensure quality is maintained.
User self-service can go too far
The goal of self-service is to balance cost, efficiency and responsiveness of analytical reporting to a business. It is possible to go too far, These new analytic tools also have ETL functionality and the ability to proliferate data cubes, thus creating data warehouses on top of data warehouses. This approach ultimately “complexifies” the analytic environment creating expensive and unresponsive overhead. An on-going data governance process will allow the organization to anticipate and manage increasing data complexity.
