2 Introduction to Ad Hoc Reporting

Reporting has always been tightly coupled to everyday business activities. As a result, reporting requirements tend to change very often. Traditionally, when such changes occurred, you were forced to rely on developers or IT staff to revise your reports to meet the new requirements. However, because developers often do not correctly anticipate the needs of report users, the resulting report designs may be inadequate, requiring further iteration and re-implementation.

InetSoft believes the solution to this problem is user empowerment. Instead of requiring you to communicate your needs to developers and then iterate over successive changes, Style Intelligence gives you direct access to powerful “ad hoc reporting” tools that allow you to rapidly and easily design your reports yourself.

Other BI tools have previously attempted to provide ad hoc reporting. However, these tools have not reached a significant level of prevalence due to the following factors:

Business reports are complex. Report writers are often large applications that have a steep learning curve.

Business information is complex. Report writers often require that you understand the database query language and know how the data is stored.

Style Intelligence solves both these problems. It addresses the first with an Ad Hoc tool that is lightweight, web-based, and easy to use. It addresses the second by automatically handling all the technical details of accessing data.

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