As we've mentioned previously, when you make BI operational, the audience for enterprise reporting can grow well beyond business analysts.

With WebFOCUS 7, we helped you expand the reach of BI reporting by making ease of use a top priority. We made reporting more accessible to end users by providing access through the same desktop tools that they use every day. We made it possible for developers to extend and customize WebFOCUS reports through a new, highly productive visual scripting environment. And we gave system administrators visual consoles that they can use to manage WebFOCUS performance.

So you can take full advantage of WebFOCUS, we are implementing new programs aimed at spreading knowledge of best practices that we have learned in 30 years of delivering enterprise reporting systems.

The benefits of exposing reports as Web services are limited only by the imagination. For instance, Web services technologies enable you to publish reporting components without having to specify the kind of client or how the report would be consumed. Furthermore, reports can be published or requested on the fly without additional programming. Thanks to WebFOCUS 7.2's support of Web services, reports can populate Web pages, Excel spreadsheets, Oracle tables, or a trading partner's supply chain system – as long as the requests meet your organization's security guidelines and are submitted using industry standards.

In recent years, you have also been asking us for better integration with ERP systems. Today, WebFOCUS 7 has been certified by SAP as being "powered by NetWeaver." That means you can get comprehensive reporting and analysis directly from inside the NetWeaver environment. And you can seamlessly include information from non-SAP ERP systems or legacy and homegrown systems, or even combine SAP BW and R3 data with other data in a single report.

To take advantage of these and other benefits of WebFOCUS, you need to implement it properly. In working alongside you over the past 30 years, we've learned a few lessons about what works, and what doesn't, and we have shared these lessons with you through user groups and the annual Summit User Conference.

Now we are adding yet another channel for you to tap best practices. We are introducing new training programs, conducting seminars, and publishing documentation covering all aspects of implementation best practices – ranging from product configuration to security, organizational support, end-user training, estimating total cost of ownership or value, and more. As you learn from the lessons of others, your organization will realize the benefits of enterprise reporting faster than ever.

Over the years, many WebFOCUS customers have had to source data from a wide variety of back-end systems. As a result of our experience, we have developed a reporting architecture that allows you to separate the task of designing reports from developing the necessary back-end connections.

The experiences of The Hillman Group show the advantages of our approach.

While cost-cutting has dominated the corporate agenda for the past three to four years, The Hillman Group, a Cincinnati-based distributor of hardware products (such as nuts, bolts, and screws) throughout North America, has been aggressively expanding through acquisition. Over the past decade, those acquisitions have quadrupled the company size to nearly $400 million.

"We need to quickly present consolidated numbers post-acquisition," said vice president and CIO Jim Honerkamp, explaining that timely reporting is necessary so the company can understand how well newly acquired units are performing. Although in the midst of a multi-year, company-wide J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne rollout, top management cannot afford to wait until the migration is complete to get the reports.

Consequently, Honerkamp's team has grown acclimated to sourcing data from new business units with unfamiliar systems. That dictated a reporting environment, designed with an integration layer to hook into existing systems, plus expertise for contending with constantly evolving IT environments. Although your organization might not be pursuing M&A as aggressively, with consolidation becoming a fact of life in most sectors, chances are your organization will face similar challenges in reporting the big picture.

Etta Levine is editorial director for Information Builders' Insights and editor in chief of Information Builders Magazine. To provide feedback go to www.informationbuilders.com/insightstalkback

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