Many companies find that they have a significant gap between their analysis and reporting capabilities and user expectations. Users become frustrated and the often significant investment made by the organisation fails to produce a return on investment. The tell-tale signs of such issues can be seen in the loss of user confidence in the enterprise solution and the proliferation of work-around spreadsheet solutions that further embed the old data silos.
Xyenta was engaged by a company facing such challenges. Their simple requirement was for us to get their reporting solution back on track.
Our initial analysis was to understand the pain points they faced, these included:
- The lack of standardisation across the report builds meant that the solution was cumbersome to maintain, undermining the company’s objective of self-service reporting.
- Users were required to build reports off complex and technical data repositories, as a result the report writers often had no confidence in the data they were using.
- Any upstream data change required each report owner to re-write a number of their reports, and it was usual for a change to be missed requiring unnecessary data analysis and investigation during already time-restricted reporting cycles.
Armed with an understanding of the challenges our architect-led team undertook a solution design review and identified the steps needed to optimise reporting suite management.
By embedding report building standards and moving to a common, integrated reporting data platform we were able to quickly help the client achieve a flexible and scalable reporting solution.
As a data technology company, we consider both the data architecture and how the business wants to use its data. Our approach provided a strong foundation for building an effective reporting capability, helping the company get their reporting solution back on track.