One thing is to make information available, another one is to make it understandable for the end user. The requirements towards the Information Delivery are as different as the different types of information that can be analyzed and processed with the final target to support any kind of decision making.

Operational Reporting

An Operational Reporting requires often a tabular and detailed representation in order to fulfill the requirements of the end users combined with a high flexibility to center the user's attention to the interesting aspects. Filtering, certain capabilties for diving into more detailed views and some support by charts are often requested here. The time scope is usually no too big, some weeks or months only, but the requirements for real time or close-to-real time reporting are high. Different approaches can be discussed here from high frequency extraction to operational reporting being executed in the source systems directly. These scenarios became possible with the increase in the calculation capacity of the hardware of today.

Dashboards and OLAP Analysis

The analysis of the evolution of a corporation on higher levels of management is drastically different to the operational reporting. Information needs to be aggregated and visualized in very comprehensive and personalized way. An easy and intuitive interaction with the data, combining it with non-structured information are here the primary design goals. The access to the information has to be well ordered and response time needs to be very good. 

Dashboard or Cockpits are very much the preferred way of information delivery to this type of information consumers. Advanced ways of visualizing information and putting it together to express their relationship and weight between the different indicators are represented in concepts like the Balanced Scorecard which needs a very careful functional design before it can be proyected to an IT environment.

In addition it is of importance that all users have an easy access to their up-to-date, correct information in order to increase the acceptance of the analytical environment. They want access to a quickly responding system so that their process of analyzing the delivered information is never interrupted by annoyingly high response times, forcing them to step out of this process.  

Mobile access to Information