Anticlue

The Business of Canned Reports

One of the annoyances of legacy systems, and sometimes even newer systems. Is the holding hostage of data via canned reports.

What is a canned report. It is a report that just shows up on a printer somewhere for the user to utilize. They may utilize this report to determine the current outstanding receivable, to determine who was admitted yesterday from the emergency department, or how many cases had a certain data entry field filled out. Its a report delivered by IS to the users, where the users have to go through IS to change or enhance the report. It comes via paper, not another tool like excel that can help with data analysis.

Enabling users to create and run reports off of their data, is a good way to go. The users have the best understanding of the nuances of their data for reporting. Most Institutions have several teams of people whose full time job is to analyze data, and create reports from that data. I think it is essential to give those people the knowledge needed to operate the technical tools, the technical tools, and a dimension reporting look at the operation data.