“ARRA” Challenges in Today’s Enterprise Reporting

For a long time, Reporting to most of organizations is known
as “second tier” priority compare to “first tier” online transaction systems.
This is still somewhat true in today’s business environment. However, Enterprise reporting is becoming increasingly critical in terms
of the roles it plays in enterprise decision marking. It is not unusual that
companies spend more time and money investing in Enterprise Reporting than online transaction systems. In some organizations, Reporting is equally or more important than online transaction systems.

Normally, A reporting system is built on top of a throughout understanding organzation's business needs, data model and daily information flows. However, to play the key roles in information decision making and
maintain high level of organizational function for long period of time, there
are new challenges have been emerging for Enterprise Reporting solution developers to consider, which I call it ARRA challenges,

Agile Construction – Ability to deliver
enterprise reporting solution incrementally through quick cycles and iterative
approaches to avoid investing one big bet upfront. In fact, most of those big
bet failed miserably because of the changing nature of enterprise business information and data. Today, Reporting solutions in enterprise need more adaptability compare
to online transaction system. The traditional ways of developing Reporting
solutions typically have a few well-known problems - big upfront cost, long
development time and stable business information flow. Agile approach will allow enterprises to enter into a healthy
build-and-use, rebuild-and-reuse cycles. Partial but early production allows enterprise
information workers’ feedback and adjustment be built in to the solutions.

Rapid Development and Deployment – Today’s
organization can not wait for the traditional waterfall cycles of writing reporting
requirement, having developers to design reports, testers to QA and operation
to deploy them to production. Business just does not have time time or the “spec” that IT
teams are looking. Instead, users are demanding rapid development
and deployment for reports. Many ad-hoc reports are just “ideas” or “try-and-see”
type of information analysis for business users. They are keen to leverage a
rapid development and deployment reporting infrastructure to probe new findings
of enterprise data in order to provide more adaptive data analysis and consumptions cycles.

Real-Time Reporting – Another tradition
in Reporting solution is that data and information provided norally are not near-real-time.
24 Hours or even longer delay in data refresh cycles are very usual solution due to the
problems of conflicting resources utilization between instantaneous online
transaction system needs and complex aggregation reporting queries. However,
today’s enterprise is driven by fast cycle of information decisions. Reporting
architect and designers need to invest in solutions that bring enterprises information and data more
quickly and timely in front of decision makers.

Availability – when mentioning high availability
and 24*7, people will think immediately for online transactional system. However,
in today’s increasing complex enterprise business environment, data needs to be
available any time around the clock and globally. This is becoming more and more
important to create and maintain enterprise wide competitiveness. You may slowly notice that your enterprise information workers are demanding the high availability of Enterprise Reporting system just like in the past of online transaction system.

It is still not easy to build an Enterprise
Reporting solution to meet the above needs. However, I believe the trend is
inevitable. Is your system ready for Enterprise Reporting?