Report analytics: bridging the gap

Overview

Many business departments and individual members of staff use business intelligence (BI) software to mine information from their databases for reporting and forecasting purposes.

Certainly BI software can be a superb tool for advanced reporting and predictive analysis, but for many day-to-day reporting tasks its sophisticated functionality is unnecessary. For such tasks staff may find the perceived complexity of BI offputting and are likely to rely on the IT department to generate reports for them, a situation that can create high workloads, introduce time delays and prompt tension amongst users who require up-to-date information to be delivered quickly for it to be of use.

For the non-technical user, what is needed is an intermediate solution: a tool that pulls data from existing documents quickly and easily and creates accurate reports without having to interrogate the data warehouse or to call upon the expertise of the IT department.

This Computing white paper looks at how organisations currently use BI tools and identifies areas in which Report Analytics might provide a bridge between the high-end features of the typical BI system and the regular reporting needs of departments such as finance.