Let us talk of a reporting catalog.

This is to provide some context for our first product - Enterprise Reporting Catalog.

Most organizations have a significant library of artifacts around reporting and analytics. Operational reporting, strategic reporting, analytics, dashboards, what-ifs, planning are some common examples for such artifacts.In addition to significant initial expenses in time and resources in building or procuring these assets, there is a continual expense in maintaining these artifacts. Justifiably so, as they fulfill important enterprise needs of information.

One thing that is often overlooked is how inefficiently these resources are utilized. Let us look at some common scenarios:

• I am a financial planning user. I would like to access operation data for reconciliation and insights. There are available reports for this information, but I am not aware of it. Only way for me to get to it is (1) to have access to someone who can tell what and where to look for such reports, and how to get access to it, or (2) put a request for this which may get routed through a maze of IT support, Vendors, Ticketing systems and developers, before I come to know it is readily available and has been all these weeks that my request was in process.

• I am a heavy reporting user and have access to variety of reports. I can access the reports that serve my business requirements, but I am unable to tie the numbers or data in these reports. I would like to know the calculations, formula and source behind it, but all I have is the report itself.

• I am an IT developer building the reports, but once a new request comes I have no way of identifying if a similar report that already exists. Or, whether the documentation which probably became obsolete the time it was posted in SharePoint or some folder, can still be relied upon when making further changes to the reporting application.

• As a business analyst, I will like to browse through all available reporting metadata, to be able to assess what is available and what can be used in various requirements I work on. There isn't a repository of reporting metadata that serves this purpose.

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As maturity level of IT and applications continues its march upward, it is imperative to look at options where an organization can best utilize its reporting and analytics assets and maximize the value of its investments. This is where an Enterprise Reporting Catalog comes into picture.

At a basic level, an Enterprise Reporting Catalog is a repository of all metadata and documentation of all reporting and analytics artifacts in the enterprise. This is sum total of all the information about business data available in the organization in reports, dashboards, analytic tools and so on. If we keep all the technical documentation in a folder accessible to users, we can call it an Enterprise Reporting Catalog (though it would be a bit of stretch). Almost every organization has some form of documentation repository, but, often it is not very useful and hence not utilized. Published location (SharePoint, or a folder or some such place) is where most of the documentation goes to die - underutilized.

With this background, what would be some of the necessary characteristics of an Enterprise Reporting Catalog that would make it worthwhile?

• Accessible to all users - Every barrier (login, secure access) reduces the usability of any such repository. This is essentially containing metadata only and thus should be widely accessible within the enterprise. Ideally it shouldn't require any software (desktop applications - e.g. Word) to access.

• User friendly navigation - Users may not know what is available or what to look for. With this in mind, the Catalog should be organized for intuitive navigation, and should have integrated search capability.

• Crowd-sourcing - A lot of enterprise knowledge is distributed among people. IT may know technical details but may not be best suited to describe business context of a report. An enterprise reporting catalog then should have capability of letting users add/edit content seamlessly. This will also ensure the content remains up-to-date.

• Metadata synchronization - Most of the time documentation is already obsolete by the time it is prepared. Documentation is not always updated with each change or enhancement. Best way to address this is to automatically synchronize metadata from the actual report definition itself.

• Content editing features - Documentation should be easy to edit, support multiple formats (Images, Documents, Spreadsheets, attachments), and easy to maintain.

• Integrated to Enterprise Applications - Ideally, it should allow navigation to and from reporting applications, and operation support applications (for Statistics, access requests etc).

We have built Enterprise Reporting Catalog solution based on these broad parameters. You can learn about it more on our products page, and in our webinars. Please reach us at info@eapl.us for more details.