Archive - Edition 2: Reporting

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Leading Article

Current Trends in Reporting

Content

Information Visualization

Selected Portals

 

Reporting – Turning Data into Information

By Christine Wiegand and Gerd Waloszek, SAP Design Guild Team – 12/22/2000

Disclaimer: Please note that this edition was written in 2000. Therefore, statements in the articles, particularly those regarding SAP's products, product strategy, branding strategy, and organizational structure, may no longer be valid.

The second edition of the SAP Design Guild takes a look at what is currently going on in the reporting field. Reporting is one of the traditional "buttresses" of ERP software, the other is applications. For this reason, reporting and applications seemed for a long time to be two different flavors of software, the information or the functionality flavor. Think, for example, of the old R/3 tools where reports were presented using ABAB lists and tables in applications were displayed as step loops and later as table controls. There seemed to be no blend of the two flavors. Reports were associated with those long and wide tables which covered endless screens and materialized in huge piles of paper. Applications were those screens full of entry fields where users entered masses of data which were then stored in some mysterious place somewhere deep inside the computer. Maybe this view has never been correct, but similar to our traffic signs which still show a steam engine or to telephone icons showing telephones with dials, these are the associations that occur to people when they hear the words "reporting" and "applications".

Things have changed a lot in the meantime though, – reason enough for the SAP Design Guild Team to take a closer look at what is really going on in the reporting field and to dedicate an edition of the SAP Design Guild to this topic. We identified four areas of interest for which we offer articles. The first section, Current Trends in Reporting is of course the topic which should arouse the most interest; it features two articles: one presents a new trend in reporting called "Analytical Applications," the second one provides an extensive overview of the field. The latter article also demonstrates that many of the classical distinctions begin to fade and will have to be replaced by new concepts, on the technical as well as on the user interface end.

Besides changing the distinctions once made between functionality and information, the Web has changed our habits and grown into a global connecting force. First, there is the Internet which is merging the whole world into one community, and then there are Intranets, using the same technology to create communities within companies. Portals have become the new concept for integrating massive amounts of information and functionality, combining flexibility and structure to offer both aspects in one package tailored to the needs of employees. In the second section Selected Portals with a "Reporting Touch," we present four portal projects from SAP's Greenfield initiative. The articles describe particular job roles and show how they are supported by the portal infrastructure.

As said above, reporting is classically associated with tables and piles of printouts. New visualization techniques help users to profit from online information and their interactivity and up-to-dateness and to keep their sight clear in the information jungle. In the third section Information Visualization we offer two articles on projects or products using new visualization techniques. A further article provides useful hints for information designers.

Finally, the Content section, approaches different aspects of this problem. In the past, content was primarily structured information - mostly numbers arranged in tables, cubes and even hypercubes. Text information was difficult to deal with for classical database applications, unstructured information could simply not be handled. You practically needed a PhD to run a simple search functionality. You had to know the distinction between a logical "AND", for example. The Web changed all this, too. It boasts unstructured information, from various kinds of texts, to images and even multimedia content. Fuzzy searching is one of the many approaches to dealing with this challenge. And the users are everyday people like you and me who just want to search for something on the Web. As the article by JoAnn Hackos shows, the structure of information is an important factor in understanding relationships among data - hierarchical or linear structures for reporting information are often ineffective. She presents the hub-and-spokes model, a non-hierarchical method of providing structure to information, as an alternative approach.

We hope you that will enjoy and profit from the new edition as much as we did when we prepared the articles.

 

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