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Enterprise Reporting a Critical Corporate
Resource
Enterprise Reporting Tools are a key requirement in today's business
environment. Data Marts, Data Warehouses, outside data sources, and
even legacy systems need to be tapped to provide the information the
business needs to survive and prosper. There is no one tool that is
going to meet every reporting requirement. While there are tools
that provide broad support, there are others that are specifically
designed for certain niches. Here the discussion will be restricted
to the more broadly applicable tools. There are certain key requirements
for any tool
Industrial Strength. Enterprise Reporting Tools
must be able to develop complex reports from a variety of data
sources. They must have the capability to manipulate data, perform
complex calculations, subtotals, percentages, etc. In an ideal world
the data is all clean, well mapped and in a relational store. In the
real world that is often not the case. In order to meet Enterprise
needs these tools must be able to over come such obstacles without having
to wait for an extensive system redesign, or Database Administrator (DBA)
support.
Read Multiple Data Sources. In the ideal world all
the data is in a relational Data Warehouse. In the real world data resides
on a number of different systems that can include any number of data
storage systems - DB2, IMS, IDMS, VSAM, ISAM, Flat Files, PC sources such
as DBase. The list of possibilities is long. A tool has to be able report from any of these sources and at
times from more than one.
Platform Independent. There was a time when IBM'S
MVS was THE PLATFORM. UNIX was an academic curiosity, PC's weren't
that powerful and just did word processing and spreadsheets, DEC was
confined to engineering. That time is well past. Now an organization
can have a variety of platform that range from MVS, UNIX, AS/400, Windows
NT, LINUX. A reporting application can start off on a PC and move to an
MVS production environment or the other way around. An tool needs to be able to make that transition with very little
change in code.
Productive. There are really two parts to the
productivity question. The first is a pure cost issue. How much
effort does it take to produce, and maintain a reporting system. How
efficiently will it run? In other words, what are the true life cycle
costs. The second part of this is how fast can the organization
react to fast changing business needs? This second is as important
as the first if not more important. It makes little sense to have a
tool that is 'inexpensive' yet let's the business down at crunch
time.
We have developed a very quick Enterprise
Reporting Test that will allow you to evaluate how well a product
stacks up to these requirements.
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