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10 Tips to Maximize Information Delivery
Avoid costly mistakes when you deploy a comprehensive enterprise information delivery solution
by John E. Gularson

Posted February 18, 2004

Charts, graphs, tables, crosstabs… business information can be accessed, formatted, and presented in a multitude of ways. While reporting tools are commonplace among enterprises today, deploying a comprehensive enterprise information delivery solution requires addressing issues of report delivery and customization, system integration and scalability, and information usability.

To best equip your organization with ready access to critical business information, you know you need to invest in your information delivery strategy. This top-ten list addresses some of the key issues you need to consider when evaluating enterprise reporting solutions.

1. Will the solution meet the varying reporting needs of all users across your organization? Information usability is a critical issue in today's business environment, and a solution that can act as a common portal for managing all of an organization's reporting needs is highly desirable. To successfully meet the varying reporting needs of users across an organization, an information delivery solution should be able to make reports actionable. In an actionable report, end users can customize particular views of information, and they can add and remove fields; sort, filter, and group data dynamically; pivot crosstabs; and drill down, up, or across data to reveal detailed and aggregate information. These actions help each user individually shape a shared report to best respond to specific information requirements.

2. How does the solution streamline information delivery and access? Web-enabled solutions extend client/server and LAN-based applications beyond the traditional confines of the office to the familiar interface of a Web browser. By empowering end users with a Web-enabled reporting solution, your company can ensure business information is available when and where it is needed. By fully harnessing the power of the Web, reporting solutions can offer ad hoc querying and analysis capabilities that streamline information delivery and allow users to create and customize reports on demand.

3. How does the solution facilitate migration from your existing reporting architecture? Enterprise-ready solutions are integrated easily into existing systems with little to no professional service support—they require no additional hardware or software support investments and leverage existing IT spending. For seamless integration, solutions based on a J2EE platform are preferred. The shift of businesses toward utilizing the Web and the adoption rate of Java technology also make J2EE-based applications the best and most affordable option for many organizations.

4. Will the solution be able to access all the data sources in your organization? In an ideal world, one homogenous data source would exist that contained all of an enterprise's critical data, which would make the job of reporting on and analyzing business data much easier. The reality, however, is we rarely encounter an environment where a single data source can manage all of a department's data, much less an entire organization's data. Reporting tools need to be adept at establishing relationships with multiple data sources and datatypes: JDBC, ODBC, XML, and so on. The most robust tools provide support for multiple data sources and datatypes, and offer APIs to access user-defined data sources from user applications.