Monday, August 26, 2013

Reporting Requirements...

In today's Business Intelligence world, there is a lot of requirements for reporting. There are lot of different types of reporting which includes adhoc,operational and discovery analytics reporting. In order to handle reporting requirements effectively one needs to have a strategy of how reports will be deployed and presented. One of the options is to have a Reporting Dashboard on a SSRS reporting Portal, the other options is to have a Sharepoint based Dashboard/Portal having key reports. The other aspect apart from Presenting the reports is how does one go about gathering requirements for reports. The following points/questions could be followed:

1. Decisions to be made with the Report.
2. Report Samples.
3. What is the report generation Complexity (This can be used to gauge the amount of development effort involved).
4. Report Complexity- This follows point number 3 very closely. This could given idea of what types of data sources are involved to get data for reports.
5. The Estimated number of users for the reports.
6. Report Distribution Channel .
7. Frequency of Reports.
8. Business Logic for Reports and anticipated frequency of change for Business Logic.
9. Is there a need for BI Solution (Cube Based Reports, Discovery analytics, Adhoc, Canned/Near Real time)
10. How are Reports Generated.

The above 10 points could be used as a guide for gathering reporting requirements and the feedback for these questions can give pointers to what type of reporting is required and can be generated. The list of points given is by no means exhaustive, these are some broad pointers.