Report Mining – Finding gold in those reports

Author: Oliver Buckley Date: 9th April 2006

1 Information from Reports – The quest for gold

In accessing information for analysis, users generally get what they need through hardcopy reports or softcopy reports. These reports are usually standard reports which would be part of the original package, they may be generated using report-writing facilities provided by the package, or they may be based on reports coded by an IT person.

Hardcopy reports have been the staple method for reporting for years and have many obvious qualities – they are a permanent record, ideal for audit and verification. Depending on how well they are structured, they provide both summary and detailed information, usually in a hierarchical manner. Hardcopy reports have their shortcomings however. Traditionally, no office is complete without stacks of listing paper which contain golden nuggets of information but like gold nuggets in their natural state, it takes a lot of sifting to find them.

Reports generally provide long listings of information presented in a certain layout. As an example, a detailed debtors listing might show each item outstanding, listed under each customer, listed in turn perhaps under each currency or credit controller. As an item of record, it is very important. It also contains much of the information required to assess the situation and draw conclusions.

However, the items of concern may not be easily discerned amongst the many pages of detail. Even skipping to the subtotals may miss important details. The exposure to a particular customer might be hard to discern if the customer has different locations falling under different parts of the report. The waters be muddied by unallocated cash. There may be accounts with balances over limits, and if so, who and how much?

Reports are generally constructed to provide a pretty generic view and may not highlight issues such as those outlined above. Getting more specific views usually requires an investment in other report layouts and can give rise to a counterproductive plethora of programmes and listings.

Hardcopy reports have another serious limitation. In organisations increasingly geographically dispersed, a hardcopy is anathema. This physical limitation is greatly ameliorated by the use of soft-copy versions of these reports. These soft-copies may be in ASCII format or quite likely PDF. This facilitates the geographical requirements of organisations, but sometimes the softcopy on the screen can be more unwieldy than the hardcopy on the desk.