Data Warehousing Solutions for Reporting Problems

Reporting is one of the basic processes in all organizations. It provides information for planning and decision making and, on the other hand, information for analyzing the correctness of the decisions made at the beginning of the process. Reporting is based on the data that the operational information systems contain. Reports can be produced directly from these operational databases, but an operational database is not organized in a way that naturally supports analysis. An alternative way is to organize the data in such a way that supports analysis easily. Typically, this method leads to the introduction of a data warehouse. In the summer of 2002, a multiple case study research was launched in six Finnish organizations (see Table 1). The researchers studied the databases of these organizations and identified the trends in database exploitation. One of the main ideas was to study the diffusion of database innovations. In practice this meant that the researchers described the present database architecture and identified the future plans and present problems. The data for this research was mainly collected with semistructured interviews, and altogether, 54 interviews were arranged. The research processed data of 44 different information systems. Most (40%) of the analyzed information systems were online transaction processing systems, such as order-entry systems. The second largest category (30%) comprised information systems relating to decision support and reporting. Only one pilot data warehouse was among these systems, but on the other hand, customized reporting systems were used, for example, in SOK, SSP, and OPTI. Reporting was commonly recognized as an area where interviewees were not satisfied and were hoping for improvements. This article focuses on describing the reporting problems that the organizations are facing and explains how they can exploit a data warehouse to overcome these problems.