Adhoc Reporting requests can mean unfulfilled Analysis needs

The vast majority of business owners and their end users are still going thru a mental transition when thinking abut reporting needs. Because reporting as we know it historically was implemented as either "canned" (out-of-the-box) reports or as "parametrized" reporting screens for "advanced" users where the users are expected to flip thru a number of parameters and conditional statements to try and get to the data they want.

Project stakeholders and development teams can sometimes go thru a lot of thrashing to try and come to a common understanding on which report combinations will be "good enough" to begin with.

Secondly, if there are budget constraints, the team will invariably choose to have minimal pre-canned reports for the operational staff and ironically, will leave out strategic reporting needs of the information analysts and executives. Then it is up to a designated power user to dive into raw data using basic tools or even good old SQL queries that they have to scrape together - the goal being to create the next reports requirements for "Phase II" or the next project iteration.

During such situations, you have to wonder whether the REAL underlying need is to approach it from an end user analysis perspective and give the END USER the tools and power to do their own analysis and figure out what's most important to them.

Today, we have world class, proven tools available for the full business intelligence (BI) life cycle that one can use to drive business efficiencies across the board much more rapidly and in much more cost effective way than before.

Over a period of time, if a number of users are ending up using similar analyses use cases, these use cases can then be taken up as requirements for the system reporting repository and appropriate permissions applied.

Data Dynamics Analysis is a .NET data visualization and analysis tool, complete with standalone test applications that you can quickly integrate within development projects with minimal effort, impress customers and accelerate end user adoption of today's .NET systems.

So next time, when a team sits down to discuss business reporting requirements and cannot come to a consensus and "ad hoc reporting" seems to be the only way forward. think about whether it's really about enabling end user data analysis in a standard programmable way that is the real need here.