Profile of the Report Author

Report Authors facilitate decision making by analyzing user requirements and then authoring business reports to satisfy information needs. Usually they are power users who have a deep understanding of business processes and overall execution of the enterprise activities. Report authors, located either within the IT department or a specific department,   map business needs with the available reporting tools to satisfy information delivery at all levels within the enterprise.

Report authors have a good understanding of Business Users’ requirements and develop or extend reports, either static or interactive in content. They also have good knowledge of source systems and the contained data within them in order to extract the appropriate amount of data for developing reports.
Report authors need to be able to quickly and easily author reports and reduce the time spent needed to create and deliver customer reports to satisfy diverse information needs.

Their tasks include:

• Analyze business needs to adrress the different levels of detail or summary information that must be delivered to users at different levels within the enterprise
• Authoring reports to deliver the appropriate amount of information to business users while ensuring that consistency is applied in terms of  visual appearance  to information consumers
• Distributing reports to the appropriate people in the most appropriate format.
• Manage change of user requirements and re-authoring of reports

Report Authors

• Simplifies the developer’s job by providing a common vocabulary and   interface for all data sources (relational, xml, excel, flat file), speeding the development of applications such as enterprise portals, dashboards, managed reports etc.
• Enables reuse of of common components throughout the whole application (e.g. templates, data sources, common objects etc)
• Enables the use of data models to map data elements to semantically meaningful object attributes, thus shielding business users from IT complexities.
• Enables the developer to establish relationships between data sets across frontiers and data source types, thus providing a more comprehensive view of the enterprise’s information assets.
• Eliminates custom-coding connections to each individual data source—which is time-consuming and error prone – and provides a unified way to access raw data from multiple sources without creating redundant data stores