Does anyone remember the original “Weekend at Bernie’s”? When the two accountants are pouring over the green and white dot matrix printouts of the accounts on the hot tar roof of their apartment building? That’s the traditional report, pages and pages of numbers. Until the invention of spreadsheets, this was the means by which accountants reviewed the accounts. Larger companies have since outgrown even spreadsheets and demanded larger data storage, like databases. However a majority of the reporting provided from these robust data stores still looks like a spreadsheet.

Detailed row data has its uses. Financial transactions and system audit logs are very useful when displayed as uniform rows of data for visual scanning. You can easily find the row that doesn’t look like the others when searching for an error, but how easy is it to determine transaction volume, or the frequency of a particular event? Are you going to count the lines and keep a tick mark tally on another sheet? You can calculate some of these statistics and group them by date, and compare the groups if all the data is still available at the source. Hopefully the query doesn’t slow down the system while users are trying to do their work on it. Save the data in monthly spreadsheets that are backed up regularly? In most cases, the generation of these reports just becomes a meaningless process and waste of paper.

Business Intelligence (BI), I don’t know who coined the term, is meant to communicate the difference between a report (any formatted delivery of data) and the display of information in a way that aides in the business decision making process. BI reporting answers questions like how are this month’s sales compared to last month’s? Or has there been a statistically significant increase in defects with the new modifications to our product?

Many professionals familiar with BI reporting make the assumption that it’s really only applicable to data collected and aggregated over a large period of time. Contact center management is the best example of why this isn’t the case. A contact center is much like an old Amateur Radio that requires constant tuning to produce the best receiving and transmitting signals. These machines come with a panel full of dials and switches used to make sure the radio and the antenna are in perfect attunement. Similarly, contact center managers are constantly monitoring the call handle and queue times making sure the correct proportion of agents are staffed for email, voice, or chat processing. These managers require timely 15 or 30 minute latent reports to determine short term staffing levels. Most companies see the customer service departments as necessary expenses to keep their customers happy. Decision makers need nearly real-time information to make constant adjustments maximizing the efficiency of the staff and keeping their customers happy.

The challenge for BI professionals is, understanding the users’ needs well enough to deliver the correct solution for the need. There isn’t a one size fits all approach to BI delivery. The assembly manager needs metrics on how many completed plastic toys are failing inspection every half hour. Management needs to compare this month’s inspection failures to the samples before switching to the new vendor, perhaps a few times a week. The executive might want to know how sales are going this year compared to the last five, but she only needs this information on the first of the month when she first walks into the office. Each one of these examples has different requirements for the size of the data set, the amount of time the report needs to be displayed for, and the near or distant data term period access.

What’s the point? Go run a search on any technology job board for Business Intelligence or BI. Employers are looking for qualified BI professionals to deliver reporting solutions way that aide in the business decision making process. It’s a growing space/niche on par with security and mobile development. If you can get past the stigma placed on this practice by developers that “Reporting Work” is somehow inferior to software development, there is a lot of opportunity to be had.