Advantages of Interactive Reporting

You might know what data analysis is, and why it is so important for an analyst to have good reports at hand so he can make best decisions in the end. However, do you know what a good report is? What must it provide for the author and for the analyst? Have you ever heard of interactive or dynamic reports? Learn here how interactive reports can help analysts and business users control their information and easily interpret or analyze data in real-time and so make better informed and faster decisions.

The basic idea of data analysis is to represent information in a human-friendly way, highlighting useful information, suggesting conclusions and ultimately supporting decision making. Data analysis assumes many techniques that can be used to analyze business information: OLAP, data mining, business intelligence, visual analysis, etc. The final part of any data analysis technique is producing reports answering questions of interest. There are many report generating systems that help people get their data in most easy way, but many of them only represent information in a one-time slice form, and so the analysts may only see what they are given, possibly missing all-important recent info. And here comes the idea of interactive reporting.

The key to the success in decision making is in having right and complete information when you need it. And here is the list of "must have" requirements for a report generator to make this possible. First, it must be able to take data from different data sources and combine them in a single report. So even if the data is located in different places the user must get them all in one place, combined and prepared as the author defined.

Then it should always provide "fresh" data. It means the report must be always actual and contain up-to-date information. Practically it means that the author should be able to define the way how and the time when the data in the report is refreshed. The end user simply does not have to know about it. What he needs is always having fresh data at hand.

Next, the report should be able to contain different elements or controls (widgets) combined in any order and possibly connected to different data sources. These widgets can display different or even the same data in different ways. Say, we want the report to display the same sales data as a sorted table and below have the diagram showing how these sales has changed over the given period of time.

Also the report should contain "active" or "live" widgets like OLAP grid and OLAP chart to provide interactivity to the report viewer. For example, in OLAP Grid you can choose the data slice in view, "drill down" to more details, "drill through" the selected cell, and more. The main idea is that the report should not be still and static, instead it must react to the user's activity. In other words, the user should not put up with what he is given - if he needs more info, he must be able to get it without generating another report.

And finally the report should allow different extents of freedom to different users. Depending on the viewer the report should give different levels of access to the data, different data sources, different widgets available, and different interactivity levels.

As a result the users get the full range of info they are really interested in, and they can actively use it to analyze in many possible aspects. If allowed, analysts can access more information as they go. The same report can be used by many users with different access levels. The levels can be controlled by the author of the report to address different audience. All this takes the analysis process to the next level of productivity and ultimately helps decision making.