Exago

Live Data is likely an entirely new concept to users who have only worked with spreadsheets before, but it’s another example of how BI “works smarter In Exago BI, you build the report with sample data (Superhero 1, Superhero 2, Superhero 3), then see the actual values or Live Data once you run or execute the report to retrieve them. So users might tweak an existing report’s font and formatting while interacting with it, but they aren’t building it ad hoc from the ground up and making decisions like which data objects to include, how to group them, or what formulas to use. In Exago BI, only a single cell containing a field has to be referenced in order to affect all the values in that field (think [B2] as opposed to [B2]-[B47]), and that’s only when a cell has to be referenced at all!

I’ve tracked them many different ways over the course of my career: as data incidents, as part of a status reporting model, through project-based issue tracking, and through a dedicated data quality issues management log. Date raised / Date added: This date field helps you keep track of when data issues are submitted, which can help you identify how long an issue remains unresolved. Use this date field to track when the issue needs to be resolved based on any dependencies it might have (ex: another technical project, business process redesign, report deployment, etc.). Ideally, this type of resource exists in your organization, as analyst skills are crucial in helping identify business needs, understand technical limitations, and figure out the root cause of a data quality issue.

In business intelligence, ad hoc reporting supplements canned reports by enabling end users to either duplicate and edit premade reports or build entirely new ones from scratch without assistance from IT. We’ve written extensively on this subject because it’s an important one. Non-technical end users are generally unfamiliar with the nuances of data modeling, so it’s important to find a solution that handles modeling behind the scenes while permitting more advanced users to adjust those defaults. Since the primary goal of an ad hoc reporting solution is to give end users direct control over their analytics, ad hoc reporting applications are typically designed to be easy to use and intuitive. Neither option satisfied the department’s endowment reporting requirements, however, so it upgraded to a plan that includes DonorPerfect’s Smart Analytics feature, a full ad hoc reporting suite that allows Converse to merge and manipulate donor information in a way that meets their unique endowment reporting needs.

Firstly, ETL solutions promise a considerable performance boost to BI users, as much of the processing those users would otherwise do server-side happens before the database is even queried for reporting. ETL would give you the opportunity to join those records, assign new primary keys, standardize formatting and naming conventions, filter out irrelevant records (or apply tenant columns), and even perform calculations, such as the difference between what employees earned this year and what they earned the previous year. Not only do you not have to rely on your IT team for all data processing, but you can also rest assured that your ETL tool’s built-in error-handling functionality will alert you to problems that need your attention. The majority of modern ETL applications permit users to interact with it through a GUI (graphical user interface), making it possible to design ETL processes with comparatively little programming knowledge.