Capitalizing on Enterprise Reporting

Business intelligence has become a major focus of business strategy and technology initiatives. The intense need for more and better information is nothing new but, as business processes and systems become more complex, it becomes more challenging to be able to provide the needed information. At the same time, intensifying competitive pressures at the top executive levels leave little room for error or slow response.

Over the last 25 years, reporting has become a key management tool. The trend toward decentralization of management responsibility and decision-making has increased the reliance on reports throughout the organization. It’s a matter of numbers: more people require reports, so more (and more complex) reports are needed to satisfy the demand. Management of the process of reporting has now become quite complicated.

In the 1990s, companies set out to reduce and eventually eliminate the cost of generating reports on paper by moving to electronic delivery of reports. But now the huge amount of reports generated and stored electronically itself has become a cost burden. It therefore is no surprise that reporting has become the focal point of many business intelligence initiatives.

To meet the demand for timely, accurate reports, organizations will need to adopt enterprise reporting initiatives that will yield consistency in both report quality and the utility of the information. Beyond that, to gain real advantage they must advance from mere reporting to performance management. Let’s look at each in turn.

Transformation to enterprise reporting

Every growing business realizes sooner or later that unplanned or habitual methods of reporting – be it by finance, sales, operations and services groups, or ad hoc reports by function or person – do not contribute to a common understanding of what has happened. For that to occur, information and its presentation across organizations must be consistent. In other words, companies must eliminate silos of disparate reports.

Of course, this is not easily accomplished. Over years, organizations have designed and tied so many of their reporting processes and systems so tightly to specific needs (and personal fiefdoms of data) that it is hard to decide what common approach should prevail.

That approach ought not to be dictated by technology, or by the vendors or reporting tools. Reporting should be planned and shaped to satisfy the user’s specific needs while meeting enterprise requirements. Determining what business users require from reports will require some analytic work, involving segmenting those users by title and level in the organization and then by type and function (such as analyst, line-of-business manager and others). Once you’ve created these categories, explore their stated needs and the reports they’ve been using. It is likely that you will find among your internal users and their requirements more commonality than differences. Those similarities will guide you toward forms and presentations that will best serve the needs of similar classes of users.

Whatever capabilities business users need, remember that simplicity is a virtue. Overwhelming users with information and capabilities they don’t really need is both counterproductive and costly, therefore it is important to start out by understanding how users employ the information in the report, how well that fits the company’s business plan and where there are gaps between the report and business goals. Taking an enterprise approach will provide an essential framework for evaluating the use and application of reports.

From reporting to performance management

Reporting provides visibility into past performance by delivering information – typically, data over time – about customers, products, suppliers, employees and other areas. It enables comparison, which in most organizations is expressed as the variance between one number and another. Traditionally, that comparison is stated in the form of actual versus planned or actual versus target or goal. But in fact, a key goal of management ought to be to maximize the role reports can play in supporting organizational change. In that regard, comparison to expected company performance or competitors’ performance is just as important.

If the information in reports provides a basis for understanding challenges or substandard performance, then change should be easier to attain. But most organizations do not yet have in place structured management processes in which reports help not only to understand current performance but more importantly to improve it. Simply put, informative reports are useful, but reports that can drive individuals to take action are mission-critical.

To make the most of their reporting investments, organizations need to adopt a performance management approach. Placing of the company’s reports and the enterprise reporting systems that generate them into a performance management framework will make it possible for management to use them as a driver for improving performance.

Organizations are beginning to realize that they need more mature reporting systems that can satisfy the next generation of business requirements for enterprise reporting.
Technology is not a replacement for improved business processes. Many organizations have attempted to transition from reports to dashboards or other advanced applications that challenge the technical sophistication of their people. It is one thing to have individuals work with automatically delivered reports but quite another for them to have to change their work habits to use a new application or dashboard. Organizations that merely replace their existing approaches with something that is faster and cheaper but do not look at making it more valuable and easier to use may be going in the wrong direction.

This situation is a useful reminder of the importance of helping the workforce to understand the various ways in which the information delivered in reports can be applied. Coherent, forward-looking management requires a policy and processes that help every individual to comprehend the results of reports and the potential implications of actions or decisions based on them. Building processes that help manage report-using performance is a way to maintain or gain a competitive advantage.

What’s next for enterprise reporting

As an organization moves forward, ensuring that references to customers, products, suppliers, employees and other categories are consistent across organizational areas will require common definitions and supporting context. These common references, in the form of what is coming to be called master data, must be designed to be usable across a variety of information systems and applications. The process of the creation of these metadata references, now being referred to as master data management or MDM is a foundation component for strategic enterprise reporting.

The modern business also needs to be able to access and analyze information drawn from multiple sources. This isn’t a need for separate reports from these sources or reports built according to specified needs; rather, what’s needed is the dynamic querying and joining of information to present a unified report. The requirement to access those sources typically is placed on the shoulders of the IT organization. Called enterprise information integration or EII, this dynamic multi-source access and processing is another required component of forward-looking enterprise reporting initiatives.

There’s a third element of enterprise reporting as well. It must be flexible – flexible enough to support users who are translating information into actions. Delivering reports in proprietary formats is rapidly becoming outmoded, giving way to formats associated with the widely used applications Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Flash, Microsoft Excel and even Microsoft PowerPoint. But delivering in different formats is only the first step; users also need secure access to data sliced and diced in various ways that will support ongoing management. Part and parcel of this also is tools and processes that will notify of variances or issues that develop between report cycles or generate exception reports into alert systems that can provide workflow context to assist in assessing a situation.

Whether you are accessing existing legacy systems or new sources of data using XML formats, your enterprise requires more flexibility. The cumbersome past of enterprise reporting, when IT had to be involved, has given way to simpler web-based interfaces for business analysts who support their own constituents. Enterprise reporting systems now support everything from direct design and deploy paradigms to embedding of reports within applications. The democratization of enterprise reporting has arrived.

Rapid evolution in reporting products

Information technology for reporting has come a long way over the last five years. In the 1990s enterprise reporting was the province of vendors who focused on the high end of the market in terms of scalability, performance and batch or even mainframe reporting. Among them were Actuate, Information Builders, Sqribe Technology (the company’s technology has evolved into the Hyperion System 9 suite), and to some extent Oracle. These vendors provided customization through 4GL and scripting interfaces to satisfy complicated requirements. While these and other vendors continue to tackle the largest and most complex deployments, organizations have come to demand simpler and broader deployments.

The providers of large-scale applications in enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), financials and supply chain management have done little in reporting. SAP, Oracle (which now incorporates JD Edwards and PeopleSoft), Siebel (which is being acquired by Oracle) and Microsoft Business Solutions (which is an amalgamation of the many organizations the company has acquired) have not invested in adding reporting to their applications. Rather, they have partnered with organizations such as Actuate, Business Objects and Cognos to provide reporting capabilities. Also, Noetix, which specializes in application-centric reporting, has evolved from being dedicated to Oracle to servicing PeopleSoft and Siebel, giving it a specialty that many organizations need.

Vendors serving the lower departmental end of the reporting and business analysis spectrum have noticed the demand for larger deployments. Including Business Objects, Crystal Technology (acquired and integrated by Business Objects), Cognos and Hyperion (which acquired Sqribe’s technology), these vendors have moved into enterprise reporting by acquisition, product innovation and advances in application server and caching technology. By challenging the status quo with simpler and less expensive approaches, they rapidly became a new generation of enterprise reporting providers.

This multi-vendor challenge was driven by Actuate, which started on lower-end platforms and shares computing power among multiple servers. Even Datawatch, which built a significant brand in the lower end of the market with a product named Monarch, has continued to grow and deliver by offering scalable server technology and easier design and deployment.

Using today’s more sophisticated web technology, reporting tools from Business Objects and Cognos enable you to create reports directly over the web, obviating the need to build an interface or install the product on each computer. This is different from the approach taken by Microsoft, which built its own client-server environment for the Windows platform. This distinctly different approach hasn’t benefited Microsoft significantly; other vendors have reported larger customer commitments and deployments of their products.

Lower-cost and more portable approaches to enterprise reporting also have cleared the path leading to open source reporting. The adoption of open source across operating systems, database systems, development environments, application servers and other areas has now been driven into reporting. These are efforts by JasperSoft, Pentaho and Actuate which worked with Eclipse to produce BIRT, a formal effort to provide open source reporting capabilities to anyone in the market. This offering is dramatically lowering costs, which could impact other low-cost providers that require Microsoft-centric infrastructure and IT skills for the design and deployments of reports.

Much is happening in the enterprise reporting segment of the business intelligence market, and a lot is at stake for organizations that have not stepped up to the next generation of capabilities. But technology alone cannot solve the basic problem: that reports are developed for people who may not have the skills and understanding to apply the information to improve results. This is no different than is the case for many other technology scenarios, except that information in reports can help drive change and produce actions that can directly improve business results.

To achieve that, though, organizations will have to go beyond retrofitting and replacing existing reporting systems. They must assess enterprise needs, and they must settle on a standard platform that can be shared across reporting needs.

Leading organizations are building such enterprise reporting systems today. They are evaluating how information is consumed and using the new systems to drive critical business actions. By developing these performance management processes, they can expect to meet their needs both today and in the future, and to take leading roles in their industries.