Anticlue

Sick of Manual Report Writing?

One of my core beliefs is that the data belongs to the user community, it should not be trapped and caged outside of those who can make it do most informative. Now there are movements towards business intellegence competency centers, which fundamentally will help make data informative. These competency centers combine IT and Business to make the reporting fundamentally beneficial. However for some places that's a future which may never come.

The other pet peeve of mine is to have someone manually run a report daily, and honestly I'm simply amazed in today's healthcare environment how common this practice has become. The reasons are due to poor, ridiculously unusable reporting tools delivered with some products. I've heard plenty of reasons ranging from our db is encrypted and that's a core business practice to if you want to report off of those fields buy this product.

Invariably there are then different solutions, which arise mainly based on the skill of the one needing to resolve the issue. Sometimes there is a large operational duty constructed or placed on an individual to derive the reports daily. Other times, another data source is created and loaded from the main source, but the data is available. Other times, fantastic BI packages are purchased but then only deployed in one department and politics get in the way.

So somehow we arrive at a place were resources are spent manually generating reports, or worse, basic necessary reports are just not created. If you end up in this deary repetitive place, check out BIRT.

BIRT works well when you have access to the data, and not any other report distribution tools.