BI Reporting: Perfecting Production
Ready Reports
People expect intelligence out of BI reports right off the bat. While it is a justified expectation, in
reality, it requires a lot of effort, thoughts before getting actionable intelligence from BI reports. For
e.g., Revenue Performance Report helps us to analyse Revenue flow for the past 12 months and also
gives us the ability to drill down to month/ day level data to understand the various impact points.
Representing the revenue performance data as a chart visually enhances the understanding of the
report. If there is a revenue dip in the month of April, it is easier to identify and drill down to
analyse the root causes. Reports like these need a lot of effort from the Business Analyst (BA) to
identify the level of intelligence that should be built into the report and to ensure that the selection
of right data to be extracted and displayed. The BI developers from their standpoint should do a
feasibility study to assess the report requirements and then develop the reports.
In order to generate an actionable intelligence on the example report stated above, Trend on
Revenue performance, three different teams need to work together:



End users (marketing / sales / etc.)
Business Analysts (BA)
BI Development team
End User
BI
Development
Team
Business
Analyst
The BA can provide all the necessary inputs towards creating a data model, cubes, writing queries
and for extracting data for the reports. Once the report is developed the BA can analyse and verify if
it reflects the reality and then can apply the “what-if” rule to understand the impact of changing the
report parameters. Until the reports reflect the reality, the BI developers will have to work closely
with the BA for generating iterations of the reports, use the data set from the live environment for
comparisons etc. until it is classified for production roll out.
Once the report has been approved and deployed to production there can be situations where some
more changes have to be made on the report based on inputs from the end users. We may not be
able to identify or foresee this during the development stage. These changes that are requested for
are the actual feedback for the development team which indicates that their report is actually being
used for gathering actionable intelligence. There may be situations where even after being deployed
in production the report goes through various iterations.
The changes requested for after a production deployment can be of a different nature – ranging
from user interface changes to additional queries, what-if scenarios, etc. While the reporting tool
may be able to address simple requirements with ad-hoc queries, there might be some other
complex requirements, like for example, the number of mobiles sold through ‘Best Buy’ in Chicago in
the US during the Thanksgiving weekends for the past 3 years, analysing the trend of sale happening
during a specific occasion for a specific group of customers. If the tool is not able to support such
complex queries, the development team will then have to tweak the reports further and provide a
solution. Therefore, until the reports are released into production and it works with real-time data,
the report will not be of use.
To summarize, the following are the steps involved in delivering a perfect report:
 The Business Analyst will need to have a better understanding of the overall needs of the BI
reports required by the end users
 Define a list of all the actionable insights required and also identify the what-if parameters
 The Development team should use the above as the base for developing the BI reports
 Only after the BA confirms the working of the reports to be accurate, the report should be
released into production
 The BI development team should make use of real-time production data to further finetuning the reports
 Wait and Watch for feedback and additional requirements from end-user/real-time users
If the development team gets more requests from the end users on fine-tuning the reports, they
can give themselves a pat-on-the-back and consider their solution to be a success! This also
means that the end users will have gained confidence on the data that they see and will come
back with more report requirements. Having said that, if the development team is not able to
cater to the end user needs within two weeks, they should start working on identifying the
weakness on their front and address it ASAP. It could be the choice of the tool,
development/production environment issues, etc., but businesses cannot wait for a
development team to take their own time to build a report. User requirements tend to keep
evolving and we have to cater to them within a short span of time say, 2 weeks.