Business Intelligence: A Software Engineer's Perspective VI (The Data Citizen)

Business Intelligence Series

More than a century ago, Jerbert G Wells wrote on mathematical literacy: "[...] the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write” [1]. The quote is occasionally misquoted as referring to Statistics, though frankly the boundaries of mathematical, statistical, numerical and data literacy tend to melt into each other, existing multiple dependencies between them.

In the age of big data, data citizens, business people able to use data, data processing and visualization tools for building solutions that enable their job, become steadily a necessity for businesses in their quest of making data-driven decisions, gaining insight and whatever valuable use data might have for the organizations. The need is not new,  Microsoft Access and Excel were used for similar purposes already in the 90s, becoming a maintenance nightmare for IT, data islands without proper backup or documentation existing through the organizations, diverse numbers being reported and contradicting each other. 

Then IT took over, trying to find alternatives for the data islands, implementing concepts like single source(s) of truth, quality gates and supporting processes, designing data models and infrastructures for self-service, allowing users to tap into the data for data exploration, discovery, reporting, etc. Getting all this right required to redesign existing infrastructures, making one step forward and a few steps back, in the end everything is a learning process. Such an effort can easily consume an organization's resources. 

Microsoft and other vendors for data-driven solutions keep insisting on how much potential exist in their tools for the data citizen, how the citizens can bring competitive advantage for organizations, automating business and supporting processes. The potential is not to neglect, though it requires a considerable investment from organizations in training and mentoring data citizens, in building data warehouses or data meshes that focus on end-user self-service needs. The data citizen needs time to learn, to play with the data, build solutions, test their usefulness in the daily tasks, respectively incorporate and disseminate the knowledge gained within the organization. 

There are many scenarios in which results can be obtained with a minimum of effort, however there are also hard limits. Besides the learning effort and the time available, there are cognitive, knowledge and ability limits that vary from person to person. Understanding what good architecture, design and techniques means is unfortunately not for everybody, and here's where the concept of citizen data analyst or citizen scientist breaks, and this independently of the tools used. There are also IT people who have similar challenges. 

It must be also recognized that the solutions built in the early stages by data citizens are primarily personal solutions that need to be reviewed and brought to the standards adopted by the organization. In time, it's expected to reduce considerably such effort by evolving data citizen's knowledge and skillset. Without this further work, the solutions built will tend to display some of the shortcomings of the solutions built on MS Access or Excel. 

The concept of data citizen can work as long the various assumptions and needs are adequately addressed, however progress will not happen overnight. The effort needs to become part of organization's long-term strategy, and the effort can be considerable for many organizations. Mentorship in terms of technical and non-technical support is needed. It's advisable to proceed in small iterative steps and integrate gradually the lessons learned.

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Resources:

[1] “Mankind in the Making”, by Herbert G Wells, 1903 [Source]

Business Intelligence: A Software Engineer's Perspective IV (The Loom of Interactions)

Business Intelligence Series 

The process of developing or creating a report is quite simple - there's a demand for data, usually a business problem, the user (aka requestor) defines a set of requirements, the data professional writes one or more queries to address the requirements, which are then used to build one or more reports. The report(s) is/are reviewed by the requestor and with this the process should be over in most of the cases. However, this is rather the exception - a long series of changes over multiple iterations are usually necessary, the queries and the reports get modified and even rewritten until they reach the final form, lot of effort being wasted in the process on both sides.

Common practices for improving the process behind resume to assuring that the requirements are complete and understood upfront, that best practices are followed, that the user gets an early review of the work and that there's a continuous communication, that process' performance is monitored, that controls are in place, etc. Standardizing the process helps to reduce the number of iterations, but only by a factor. Unfortunately, the bigger issue - the knowledge gap - is often ignored.

There's lot of literature on problem solving, on what steps to follow, on how to define the problem, what aspects should be considered, etc. Recipes are good when one knows how to follow them, respectively how to cook, and that can be a tedious process. It is said that framing the right problem is half the way to its solving, and that's so true. Part of the bigger issue is that users need data to better understand the problem, however the drives can be different - sometimes is problem's complexity, while other times the need is apparent, only with the first set of data the users start thinking seriously about the problem. 

So, the first major gap is between the problem and user's knowledge about the problem. Experience and theory can help reduce the gap, however the most important progress comes when the user understands the data behind the various processes that overlap with the problem. Sometimes, it's enough to explore the data visually, while other times deeper explorations are needed. Data literacy is important, though more important are the exposure to the data and problems of different variety and complexity, respectively having the time for this. 

The second gap concerns the data professional - building the data model and the logic for the report requires domain knowledge. The level of knowledge depends from case to case, and typically what one doesn't know has the biggest impact. A data professional can help to the degree of the information, respectively knowledge he has about the business. The expectation to provide a report based on a set of fields might be valid for simple requirements, though the more complex a problem, the more domain knowledge is needed. Moreover, the data professional might need to reengineer the logic from the source system, which can prove challenging only by looking at the data.

Ideally, the two parties should work together starting with problem's framing and build common ground while covering the knowledge gaps on both sides. Of course, the user doesn't need to dive into the technical knowledge unless the organization leverages this interaction further by adopting the data citizen mindset. Such interactions can help to build trust, respectively a basis for further collaboration. Conversely, the more isolated the two parties, the higher the chances for more iterations to occur. 

Covering the knowledge gaps might look like a redistribution of the effort, though by keeping the status quo there is little chance for growth!

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Business Intelligence: A Software Engineer's Perspective III (More of a One-Man Show)

Business Intelligence Series 

Probably, in some organizations there are still recounted stories about a hero who knew so much about the business and was technically proficient that he/she was able to provide data-driven answers to most business questions. Unfortunately, the times of solo representations are for long gone - the world moves too fast, there are too many questions looking for an answer, many of them requiring a solution before the problem was actually defined, a whole infrastructure is needed to be able to harness the potential of  technologies and data, the volume of knowledge required grows exponentially, etc. 

One of the approaches of handling the knowledge gap between the initial and required knowledge in solving problems based on data is to build all the required knowledge in one person, either on the business or the technical side. More common is to hire a data analyst and build the knowledge in the respective resource, and the approach has great chances to work until the volume of work exceeds a person's limits. The data analyst is forced to request to have the workload prioritized, which might work in certain occasions, while in others one needs to compromise on quality and/or do overtime, and all the issues deriving from this. 

There are also situations in which the complexity of the problem exceeds a person's ability to handle it, and that's not necessarily a matter of intelligence but of knowhow. Some organizations respond with complexity to complexity, while others are more creative and break the complexity in manageable pieces. In both cases, more resources are needed to cover the knowledge and resource gap. Hiring more data analysts can get the work done though it's not a recipe for success. The more diverse the team, the higher the chances to succeed, though again it's a matter of creativity and of covering the knowledge gaps. Sometimes, it's more productive to use the resources already available in organization, though this can involve other challenges. 

Even if much of the knowledge gets documented, as soon the data analyst leaves the organization a void is created until a similar resource is able to fill it. Organizations can better cope with these challenges if they disseminate the knowledge between data professionals respectively within the business. The more resources are involved the higher the level of retention and higher the chances of reusing the knowledge. However, the more people are involved, the higher the costs, especially the one associated with the waste of effort. 

Organizations can compromise by choosing 1-2 resources from each department to be involved in knowledge dissemination, ideally people with data and technology affinity. They shall become data citizens, people who use  data, data processing and visualization for building solutions that enable their job. Data citizens are expected to act as showmen in their knowledge domain and do their magic whenever such requirements arise.

Having a whole team of data citizens opens new opportunities for organizations, though such resources will need beside domain knowledge and data literacy also technical knowledge. Unfortunately, many people will reach their limitations in this area. Besides the learning effort, understanding what good architecture, design and techniques means is unfortunately not for everybody, and here's where the concept of citizen data analyst or citizen scientist breaks, and this independently of the tools used.

A data citizen's effort works best in data discovery, exploration and visualization scenarios where the rapid creation of prototypes reduces the time from idea to solution. However, the results are personal solutions that need to be validated by a technical person, pieces of the solutions maybe redesigned and moved until enterprise solutions result.

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Business Intelligence: Self-Service BI (An Introduction)

Introduction

According to Gartner, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, Self-Service BI (aka self-service analytics, ad-hoc analysis, personal analytics), for short SSBI, is a “form of business intelligence (BI) in which line-of-business professionals are enabled and encouraged to perform queries and generate reports on their own, with nominal IT support” [1].

Reading between the lines, SSBI presumes the existence of an infrastructure made of tools to support it (aka self-service BI tools), direct or indirect access to row data and/or data models for the users, and the skillset needed in order to work with data and answer to business problems/questions.

A Little History

The concept of self-service is not new, it just got “rebranded” and transformed into a business opportunity. The need for business users to perform ad-hoc analyses was always there in organizations, especially in the ones not having the right infrastructure for harnessing their data. Even since the 90s with the appearance of products like MS Excel or MS Access in many organizations users were forced by the state of art to learn how to use such products in order to get the answers they needed from the data. Users started building personal solutions, many of them temporary, intended to fill the reporting gaps organizations had. With a little effort and relatively small investment users had the possibility of playing with the data, understanding the data, identifying and solving problems in the business. They acquired thus a certain level of business expertise and data awareness becoming valuable resources in the organization.

With time such solutions grew in scope and data volume, gained broader visibility and reached deeper in organizations, some of them becoming team, departmental or cross-departmental solutions. What grows uncontrolled with time starts to have negative impact on the environment. First tools’ management became a problem because the solutions needed to be backed-up and maintained regularly, then other problems started to surface: security of data, inefficient data processing as increasing volumes of data were processed on local computers and transferred over the network, data and effort were duplicated, different versions of reality existed as different numbers were reported, numbers that were reflecting different definitions, knowledge about the business or data-analysis skillsets. The management needed a more consolidated and standardized effort in order to address these problems. Organizations were forced or embraced the idea of investing money in modern BI solutions, in more powerful servers capable of handling a larger amount of requests, in flexible data models that facilitate data consumption, in data quality initiatives. Thus through various projects a considerable number of such solutions were converted into more standardized and performant BI solutions, the IT department being in control of the changes and new requests.

Back to Present

With IT in control of the reporting requirements the business is forced to rely on the rapidity with which IT is able to address new requirements. Some organizations acquired internal resources in order to build reports and afferent infrastructure in-house, others created partnerships with vendors, or approached a combination of the two. As the volume of requirements isn’t uniform over time, the business has to wait several days between the time a requirement was addressed to IT and a solution was provided. In business terms a few of days of waiting for data can equate with the loss of an opportunity, a decision taken too late, decision that could have broader impact.

A few years ago things started to change when the ad-hoc analysis concept was rebranded as self-service and surfaced as trend. This time vendors like Qlik, Tableau, MicroStrategy or Microsoft, some of the main SSBI vendors, are offering easy to use and rich functionality tools for data integration, visualization and discovery, tools that reflect the advances made in graphics, data storage and processing technologies (e.g. in-memory databases, parallel processing). With just a few drag-and-drops users are able to display details, aggregate data, identify trends and correlations between data. In addition the tools can make use of the existing data models available in data warehouses, data marts and other types of data repositories, including the rich set of open data available on the web.

Looking at the Future

Like its predecessors, SSBI seems to address primarily data analysts and data-aware business users (aka data citizens), however in time is expected to be adopted by more organizations and become more mature where already adopted. Of course, some of the problems from the early days more likely will resurface though through governance, better architectures and tools, integration with other BI capabilities, trainings and awareness most of the problems will be overcome. More likely there will be also organizations in which SSBI will fail. In the end each organization will need to find by itself the value of SSBI.

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Resources:
[1] Gartner (2016) Self-Service Analytics [Online] Available from: http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/self-service-analytics
[2] Gartner (2016) Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, by Josh Parenteau, Rita L. Sallam, Cindi Howson, Joao Tapadinhas, Kurt Schlegel, Thomas W. Oestreich [Online] Available from: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2XXET8P&ct=160204&st=sb

Business Intelligence: Is MS Access or Excel the Answer to your Problems?

Business Intelligence Series

Introduction 

That’s one of the questions that followed me for years, quite often being asked by customers to provide a MS Access or MS Excel solution as an answer to a business need. The beauty of this question is that there is no right answer and, as I stressed out in several occasions, there is not always a straightforward answer to such a question in IT, the feasibility of an IT solution relying on many variables formulated typically in term of business and IT requirements. 

When a customer is requesting to built a MS Access or Excel solution outside of Office paradigm, I’m kind of circumspect, and this not because they are not great tools, but because they are not adequate for all purposes. I even recommend the two for personal or for small-scale solutions, though their applicability should stop right there.

A personal solution is an application developed for personal use, for example to store and maintain the data for a report, to process data automatically or any other attempt of automating some tasks. By small-scale solutions I’m referring to the following types of applications: 
- applications of basic to average complexity, that don’t require complex design or could be developed by a developer with average skills.
- applications that target a small number of users, usually a small group of max 10-20 concurrent users, it may be occasionally a whole department or it could be cross departmental as long the previous mentioned condition are met.

A Short Review 

 
MS Excel is the perfect tool for storing non-relational tabular data, manipulating data manually or with the help of formulas, doing data analysis with pivoting and charting, or of querying various data sources. Its extensibility based on its DOM (Document Object Model), VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and its IDE (Integrated Development Environment), Forms, add-ins, in-house or third-party developed libraries, the template and wizard-based approach, make from Excel a powerful development environment. I would say that Excel’s weakness resides in its intrinsic design, the DOM model which lacks a rich event model, in the fact that Excel is mainly a tool for data entry, analysis and reporting, the other types of functionality coming on a secondary plan. Excepting a few new features built in Excel itself, the important new functionality comes as add-on – SQL Server-based data mining add-in, MS Sharepoint Server-based Web Services features like multiuser collaboration, slicer and a few other.

The extensibility capabilities mentioned above are not only a particularity of Excel but apply to the whole Office family: Access, Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, and even Visio if is considered the “extended family”, each of them with its role. Access’ role is that of flexible relational data storage, querying and reporting solution, its strength relying mainly in the easiness of providing a simple UI (User Interface) for maintaining and navigating the data, in the easiness of pulling data from various sources for further analysis. As in the case of Excel, Access’ weakness resides in its DOM, in the fact that it’s not a full RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) and all the consequences deriving from it.

Programming for the Masses/Citizens

 
The great thing about VBA is that also non-developers could successfully adventure in developing Office-based applications, the possibility of learning from the code built with “Record Macro” functionality allowing a small learning curve. Enabling “non-developers” to built applications makes from Office a powerful and altogether dangerous tool because such applications could be easily misused. Misused here refers to the fact that often is attempted to built in Excel or Access complex applications that sooner or later break apart under their complexity, that organizations arrive to have a multitude of such applications with no control over their existence, maintenance, security, etc. 

Unfortunately the downsides of such applications are discovered late in the process, when intended functionality is not available, thus arriving to reinvent the wheel, patch up functionality in a jumble, in a tumble. With some hard-work you could achieve the alike functionality as the one available in powerful frameworks like .Net, WPF, WCF or Silverlight, to mention the Microsoft technologies I’m somewhat acquainted to. VBA is great but with time became less powerful than VB, C# or C++ (the comparison between VBA and C++ is a little forced), to mention the most important programming languages for writing managed code in .Net. The barriers between the capabilities of the two types of programming languages are somehow broken by the possibility of developing add-ins and libraries for MS Office or of using Office DOM in .Net applications, though few (non-) programmers adventure on this path.

The Architectural Perspective 

 
There is another important architectural perspective – separating the data storage and eventually data processing from presentation. Also when using Access or Excel the data storage could be separated from presentation, though I’ve seen few solutions doing that, the three layers coexisting usually within the same tire. An Access solution could be split in two, one for database and other for UI and processing, allowing more flexibility in what concerns the architecture, security, version management, etc. 

Access is good for data presentation and rapid prototyping, though the concept and the data controls are quite old, having several limitations when compared with similar controls available for example in .Net. The advantage of using simple drag-and-drop or wizards in Access is for long over, the same functionality existing also in Visual Studio (Express), environment in which applications could be built with drag-and-drop and wizards too, in plus taking advantage of additional built-in features. The database layer could be replaced with a full RDBMS, same as the presentation layer could be replaced with a .Net UI. It’s not much easier then to built the architecture around the .Net UI and a RDBMS?!

 
Excel is considered by many as a (relational) database, is it really so? It’s true the data could be stored in tabular format in which a sheet plays the role of a table and queryable through the various drivers available, though no primary key is available, less control over the data entered and many other features available in RDBMS need to be provided programmatically, again reinventing the wheel. Same as in the case of Access, Excel could be considered for data storage and presentation, its functionality being reduced when compared with the one of Access. 

Many people are used with the data entry mechanism available in Excel, especially in what concerns data manipulation, wanting similar functionality in other tools. If this was Excels’ advantage some time ago, that’s no more valid, several rich data grids offering similar data entry functionality which, with some effort, could simulate to an acceptable degree the functionality of Excel, and they could provide also richer validation functionality.

It’s all about Costs 

 
In the past MS Excel and Access were quite cheap as "development platforms" when compared with the purchasing of existing IDE, especially when we consider their extensibility through VBA and IDE’s availability, thus the functionality vs. extensibility favorable ratio. Recently were introduced express (aka community) versions of powerful IDEs for Visual Studio, respectively open source IDE and development frameworks that provide rich capabilities, the report of forces changed dramatically in the favor of the later. 

Today you could put together a small-scale application with a minimum of investment, making sometimes obsolete the use of Office tools outside of the Office solutions. The pool of software tools and technologies changed in the past years considerable, but the mentality in what concerns the IT infrastructure and software development changed less. It’s true that sometimes organizations lack the resources who could architect and design such solutions, relying mainly on external resources, or being much easier to rely on an employee’s programming skills who knows “exactly” what's needed and it would be in theory much easier in order to attempt solving a problem directly rather than writing the requirements down. 

In VBA’s advantage comes also the fact that normally software solutions evolve and need to be changed in order to reflect business or philosophy changes, being much easier to introduce such changes directly by the employee who built the application in contrast with starting a whole project for this purpose. This aspect is rooted in other perspective – sometimes organizations ignore the software needs, falling in employees attribution to find cheap and fast ways of automating tasks in particular, solving work-related problems in general, Excel or Access being quite handy for this purpose. Sure, you can do almost anything also in Excel/Access but with what costs?

The Strategic Context 

 
Several times I heard people talking about replacing the collection of Excel sheets with an Access solution. I know that in the absence of adequate solutions people arrive to store various types of data in Excel sheets, duplicating data, loosing the control over versions, data quality, making data unsecure/unavailable or un-processable. Without a good data management and infrastructure strategy the situation doesn’t change significantly by using an Access solution. 

It’s true that the data could be easier stored in a global place, some validation could result in better data quality, while security, availability and data maintainability could suffer some improvements too, however the gain is insignificant when compared with the capabilities of a full-featured RDBMS. Even if a company doesn’t have the resources to invest in a mature RDBMS like Oracle or SQL Server, there are also the Express versions for the respective databases, several other free solutions existing on the market especially in the area of open source. On the other side it’s true that MS Access, through its easy to use SQL Designer, allows people building queries with simple drag-and-drops and limited SQL knowledge, though its value is relative.

Talking about data management strategy, it concerns mainly the data quality as a function of its 6 main dimensions (accuracy, conformity, consistency, completeness, duplicates, referential integration) to which add data actuality, accessibility, security, relevance, usability, and so on. The main problem with personal solutions is that they lead to data and logic duplication, and even when such solutions are consolidated in one form or another, their consolidation and integration is quite complex because you have to consider not only the various designs but also the overall requirements from a higher perspective. On the other side it’s difficult to satisfy the needs of all the people in an organization, in a form or another, duplication of data being inevitable, with direct or indirect implications on data quality. It is required some effort and a good strategy in what concerns these aspects, finding the balance between the various requirements and the number of solutions to satisfy them.

Reformulating the Question

How can we determine which tool or set of tools is appropriate for our problem? Normally the answer to this question depends on the needed functionality. The hard road in answering this question is to identify all the requirements, the features available in the various tools, weight both of them, and decide what worth best. Unfortunately that’s not an easy task, it need to be considered not only actual but also future requirements, organization’s strategy, and whatever might come around. 

Reports, best practices, lessons learned or other type of succinct content might help as well in taking a decision without going too deep in analyzing features and requirements thoroughly. Sometimes a gut feeling might work as well, especially when comes from a person with experience in the field. Other times you don’t have too many options – time, resources, knowledge, IT infrastructure, philosophy or politics reducing your area of maneuverability/decision. In the end we learn by doing, by fighting with the constraints and problems we have, hopefully we learn also from our or others’ mistakes…

PS: Even if I’m having several good cumulated years in developing solutions based on Excel and Access, and I can’t pretend that I know their full potential, especially when judged from the perspective of the new features introduced with Excel 2007 or 2010, even more when considering their integration with SharePoint, SQL Server or other similar platforms. The various software tools or platforms existing on the market allow people to mix functionality theoretically in unlimited ways, the separation of functionality between layers, SaaS (software as a service) and data meshes changing the way we program and perceive software development.

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Business Intelligence: Enterprise Reporting

Business Intelligence Series

Introduction

Let's suppose that your company invested lot of money in an ERP system, and besides the complex setup many customizations were made. To increase ERP system's value, monitor the operations and make accurate decisions you'll need some reports out of it. What do you do then?

In general, there are 5 types of reporting needs: 

• OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) system providing reports with actual (live) data;
• OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) reports with drill-down, roll-up, slice and dice or pivoting functionality, working with historical data, the data source(s) being refreshed periodically;
• ad-hoc reports – reports provided on request, often satisfying one time reports or reports with sporadic needs;
• Data Mining tool(s) focusing on knowledge discovery (aka Data Science);
• direct data access and analysis (aka self-service BI).

Standard Reports 

ERP systems like Oracle Applications, Dynamics AX or SAP come by default with a set of (predefined) standard reports, which in theory cover basic reporting needs. Unfortunately the standard reports are not as flexible as expected, e.g. they can be exported only to text and/or in a non-tabular format, and therefore impossible to reuse for detailed analysis, have inadequate filtering parameters/constraints, behavior or scope. If existing functionality has been customized, most probably existing reports need to be adapted to the new logic. In the end customers need to change the existing reports or adopt an OLAP solution.
    

Vendors tend to keep the secrecy about their solutions and/or don't invest much time into documenting systems' functionality. Therefore, the information about ERP’s internals is limited, while good developers are hard to find or really expensive, and often they needing to reinvent the wheel. ERP vendors do provide documentation about their system's internals, though there are still many gaps concerning tables’ structure and functionality. Fortunately, armed with enough patience, some knowledge about existing business processes and databases, a developer can reengineer an important part of the logic, though there's always a shade of doubt whether the logic is entirely correct or complete. Other good news is that more and more professionals blog on ERP topics, however few are the source that bring something new.

OLAP Reporting  

OLAP solutions presume the existence of a data warehouse that reflects the business model, and when intelligently built it can satisfy an important percentage from the BI requirements. Building a data warehouse or a set of data marts is an expensive and time consuming endeavor and rarely arrives to satisfy everybody’s needs. There are also vendors that provide commercial off-the-shelf data models and solutions, and at a first view they look like an important deal, however such models are inflexible and seldom cover all requirements. One can end up by customizing and extending the model, running in all kind of issues involving model’s design, flexibility, quality, resources and costs.   

 

There are many ways in which things can go wrong or be misused. One of such scenarios is when an OLAP system is used to satisfy OLTP reporting needs. It’s like using a city car in a country cross race – you might make it to compete or even end the race, if you are lucky enough, but don’t expect to make a success out of it!

Ad-hoc Reporting   

The need for ad-hoc reports will be there no matter how complete and flexible are your existing reports. There are always new requirements that must be fulfilled in utile time and not rely on the long cycle time needed for an OLTP/OLAP report. Actually many of the reports start as ad-hoc reports and once their scope and logic stabilized they are moved to the reporting solution. Talking about new reports requirements, it worth to mention that many of the users don’t know exactly what they want, what is possible to get and what information it makes sense to show and at what level of detail in order to have a report that reflects the reality. 

In theory is needed a person who facilitate the communication between users and development team, especially when the work is outsourced. Such a person should have in theory a deep understanding of the business, of the ERP system and reporting possibilities, deeper the knowledge, shorter the delivery cycle time. Maybe such a person could be dispensable if the users and development have the required skill set and knowledge to define and interpret clearly the requirements, however I doubt that’s achievable on large scale. On the other side such attributions could be taken by the IM or functional leaders that support the ERP system, it might work, at least in theory.

Data Mining   

Data Mining tools and models are supposed to leverage the value of an ERP system beyond the functionality provided by analytic reports by helping to find hidden patterns and trends in data, to elaborate predictions and estimates. Here I resume only saying that DM makes sense only when the business reached a certain maturity, and I’m considering here mainly the costs/value ratio (the expected benefits needing to be greater than the costs) and effort required from business side in pursuing such a project.

Self-Service BI   

There are situations in which the functionality provided by reporting tools doesn’t fulfill users’ requirements, one of such situations being when users (aka data citizens) need to analyze data by themselves, to link data from different sources, especially Excel sheets. It’s true that vendors tried to address such requirements, though I don’t think they are mature enough, easy to use or allow users to go beyond their skills and knowledge.
 

Most of such scenarios resume in accessing various sources over ODBC or directly using Excel or MS Access, such solutions being adequate more for personal use. The negative side is that people arrive to misuse them, often ending up by having a multitude of such solution which maybe would make sense to have implemented as a report.

There are managers who believe that such tools would allow eliminating the need for ad-hoc reports, it might be possible in isolated cases though don’t expect from users to be a Bill Inmon or Bill Gates!

Conclusion   

All the tools have their limitations, no matter how complex they are, and I believe that not always a single reporting tool or platform will address all requirements. Each of such tools need a support team and even a center of excellence, so assure yourself that you have the resources, knowledge and infrastructure to support them!

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