December 6, 2004 at 10:50 am
Hello,
I would appreciate your estimates how much efforts, resources, time, money etc is spent developing/deploying/supporting Decision-Making, Reporting, Presentation database applications versus the same characteristics for Transaction-Processing, Storage systems? Just the percentage.
What I mean, we work with databases by getting data in, storing/processing data and getting the data out either by reporting on the data or moving/copying data out somewhere. I am interested in the ratio in the efforts in getting data in, storing/processing versus getting data out in the presentable form.
Any thoughts and / or references will be appreciated.
Yelena
Regards,Yelena Varsha
December 7, 2004 at 2:04 pm
I have no idea, but in my experience....
The upper echelons of corporations hold the purse strings and so they are much more willing to throw around a million or two here or there to get a spiffy report with a graph, rather than spend that million or two improving the business process, replacing or upgrading software that supports the basic business function. That is, more money is spent on executive reporting (I'd say) than actual development/(non-reporting) support.
That has nothing to do with what effort is involved in development. The largest factor involved in development of systems is competence. Systems are orders of magnitude less expensive when developed competently, and this is extremely--almost infinitely-- rare.
Cost of decision-making/reporting/... apps has that same competence issue but nearly an equal part is how good are the base systems they're getting the info from. ("Good" as in well designed/documented).
Bottom line... there is no objective ratio between the two. Differences are only subjective.
December 7, 2004 at 4:23 pm
John, thanks! Those are good points.
I need to clarify why I am asking those questions. Somehow the executive reporting (oh, I like this term) as well as other types of reporting was not included in the big picture when one of the new roadmaps were presented. But I know from my experience that we have projects come and go that do exclusively with the reporting. Moreover, many of the transactional tools like CRM clients and SAP clients they do allow for quering the database, but not nearly enough for the reporting needs. I support different types of projects and almost in every case business owners /users ask for more reports involving different reporting tools. I just did not want this area (as well as several others) to be overlooked in the planning.
I totally agree with your points. Good competent development will make costs go down including reporting costs, I am MCSD myself. And I completely agree that the report quaity is as good as the provided data documentation and yes, the original design.
Thanks again,
Yelena
Regards,Yelena Varsha
December 7, 2004 at 4:55 pm
First off you have to consider the complexity of the transaction taking place versus the value they are trying to show. Sure I can put a record for a call center in every state change for a rep on the phone. But until someone ties that data to outage data, schedules, meetings, leave, call volumes, unhandled calls, followup, and amount of cost per call no one cares about the data. A lot more effort deffinently goes into getting the data back out than it does to getting it in unless you have poor sourcing and have to spend a lot of time cleasing the data. And then once you have it built and get it automated you have to realize that the core of what is going on is how to express that data to someone to affect change based on what the data says. Otherwise the most important part (which is the data) will die off and be a waste of revenue in itself which means someone else probably wrote a database to collect stats on that database (and others) and a lot of time was spent creating reports to justify putting the bullet into it.
It is a vicious cycle of competing data products and who can make the bets source for reports that affect the most change.
December 8, 2004 at 3:58 pm
Antares, thanks.
I like your opinion too and the concept of Competing Data Products.
I went to the Microsoft seminar "Unlocking BI Power in SQL Server!" today delivered by GreyStone Solutions http://www.greystone.com I thought they would talk about BI Development Studio in SQL Server 2005, but it was an excellent high-level overview of many Microsoft tools. Generally speaking we have 1 storage tool - SQL Server and by Greystone definition those reporting tools: Excel, DTS, Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Sharepoint Services and Office Business Scorecards Accelerator
Excel and Access are probably changing roles from database storage tools to reporting tools by some opinions
Yelena
Regards,Yelena Varsha
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