What's Enterprise Reporting and Why do I care?

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There are many definitions for Enterprise Reporting from the Internet. To focus on the topic in this blog, my definition is,

Enterprise Reporting is the capability for a corporation to enable information workers provide data and analysis to decision makers quickly and cost effectively by leveraging information available throughout and outside the enterprise.

Every organization is probably doing some sort of Enterprise Reporting today by using technology in-house or existing commerical solutions. Different solutions might provide very different functionalities or need for the enterprise. The areas could differentiate one solution from others are,

  • Capability: which level of capability is your solution providing? Can this capability be scalable with the information growth? Or when the company grows?
  • Quickly: how fast can your solution make the data and information available to decision maker?
  • Cost: does it require high cost to implement your enterprise reporting? Can the solution adapt to the changing business environment and still with cost effectiveness?
  • Enterprise Data: is your solution only providing data and information for a core product or it links cross-functional data?
  • Outside the Enterprise: does your solution integrate with external partners or suppliers or customers' data?
  • Operational: is your solution easy to deploy and maintain in the enterprise? Does it have high availability, secure and other operational attributes?

SQL Server 2005 has provided a very powerful overall solution to address many of the areas/topics listed above. That is the key reason why we choose it to implement our solution. In the coming blog, I'll discuss more details and present you a generic infrastructure framework built by SQL 2005 products and technologies. Re-using this framework for Enterprise Reporting could save $$$ and time. Hope you enjoy the reading and can share some comments or feedback.