Reporting is often neglected in the typical DWH project. IT consider it's job done when the data is available, and the user still does not have the means to use the information efficiently.

The main value a reporting solution can deliver in this case is a more time-efficient creation of the reports, enabling a timely and less error prone delivery of the report. From our experience there is no "one size fits all" reporting solutions.

Some companies or functions put their emphasis on standard reports, with detailed, printer-friendly formatting and completely foolproof interaction trough simple parameter selections. More and more often end users request very business-specific reports, with advanced visualization techniques such as maps to enable a better understanding of the data.

Other companies or functions are looking for analytical capabilities where users are able make their own queries, independently from IT, defining reports as they browse trough the data. These reports answer questions, try to explain abnormalities in the data, analyze the causes, the main contributors, look at growth rates, visualize the data using a variety of graphs, etc.. If a report would need to be made by IT for each question, this would not be possible. And with modern tools, users do not need any technical skills to perform such analysis. All they need is to know their business.

"When information is "around" people start asking all sorts of useful questions, and require more information." Tom Peters

In our opinion users and sometimes even business executives spend too much time copying and pasting data to produce the same reports every month. They are however highly skilled and trained, and could deliver a tremendous amount of business value if they could spend their time understanding their business, seeking for ways to improve it.

We at CIS do not only want to unlock your data and making it easily accessible. We want you to access the data, to enable you to understand it, to analyze it and to produce and deliver information that allows you to manage the performance of your company or function.

"The increasing volume of information is just more opportunity to build better answers to questions." Larry Page

Several different needs need to be approached when building up a reporting platform. Production Reports, which focus mostly on information delivery, are published on a regular basis. Critical issues are to minimize cost and time to produce these reports Ad Hoc queries, which are only needed once. To enhance this type of query, the data needs to be centralized and accessible Ad-Hoc Analysis. Analysis multiplies the number of queries, and performance becomes a crucial point. The data navigation options need also to be quite evolved to enhance the usability for the end user. Guided Analytics is a framework of tools which enable assistance to the user to perform his analysis, for example a wizard that helps him creating a complex calculation.