Enterprise Storage Solutions For Data & Document Management COLD report mining for the enterprise By Jeremy Bentley, VP of Marketing Microbank Software The need to facilitate informed decision making in today's more competitive market has drawn a lot of attention to data warehousing, decision support systems, and EIS for executive--or everyone's--information systems. One of the most well-utilized information sources in any organization is the computer-generated report. Host systems produce reports by the ton. They are delivered to the physical desktop of the user, where they provide the source for much business analysis and decision making--off-line, non-automated, and work intensive. COLD (computer output to laser disc) technology has become the technical solution for the storage of massive quantities of report data. The business case for COLD projects typically comes from shrinking the printing budget by eliminating microfiche and paper costs. COLD's beginnings are to be found in the imaging industry. Computer reports were treated under the same paradigm as any scanned document, i.e., the page, and often converted to a picture format as well. Today, driven by the reduced space required to store a page of native binary spool file (as opposed to a picture format such as TIFF), the format restriction has lifted, yet most COLD systems continue under the page paradigm. The paradox surrounding computer reports Is a computer report more like an image (page- and picture-based), or is it closer to a database (binary, structured and a source of business information)? Harnessing the report information through report mining technology greatly assists business professionals to answer and solve business problems. Further, the perception of COLD as a page-based archive solution cripples the medium as a business weapon for users. The truly usable COLD system must provide report mining. This is because: * It is the information in the report that is important, and not the page itself. * The information that the user is looking for may be spread across many pages of a report, and in many instances of the report over time. * The report is the information schema that is readily understood by the business peo ple, yet is disadvantaged in a technical sense because it lacks the key component of data usability. * Users are frustrated from being swamped in data without access to the key information in the data. Database technology on its own does not solve this problem because the user is not familiar with the database schema and the normalized relationships that accompany a good database design. Understanding these problems has led to investment in a technology known as report mining, which removes the technical disadvantages by adding usability to the report so that it can be queried by a business person much as a database is queried by a database expert. There are fundamental differences between querying a report and querying a database. These differences make the two media (reports and databases) partners in information provision. The use of reports in an enterprise Historically, numerous, and usually lengthy, reports have been the vehicles used most often to present internal data to users in a form that was meaningful. External reports are produced for communication with the outside world. The two types of report found in any organization are internal and external reports. Internal reports typically account for over 65% of the total report production by an organization's host systems. These reports are the lifeblood of management information, process and control in the different departments. Characteristics of internal reports include: * They are one of the core information sources for the myriad business processes that keep any organization viable. * The information buried in internal reports serves different needs at different levels and at different times. For example, summary vs. detail listings, different sort orders of the same information, and production of multiple copies. * Reports are the record of the business at a particular point in time. * Reports often have a long statutory storage requirement and the need for archive management. * The volume of a report repository extends to terabytes over the archive lifetime. * Each report originally developed by a programmer from database sources represents a line-of-business view. This line-of-business view is a "de-normalized" view of the data designed to give the complete business context. * A report contains calculated fields that may never be stored on the host database, making the report all inclusive. * Reports are designed, from the outset, with the user in mind. External reports, i.e., those reports that are sent out of the organization (advisories, statements, confirmations) tend to have more specialized formatting (fonts and graphics) for external consumption. In addition, they are rarely referred to again, except in customer service to validate the customer's position during an inquiry. That physical reports, and databases, fail to satisfy the demand for information is evidenced by the long list of enhancements to existing reports found on any IT manager's desk. Reports, although they present valuable, line-of-business information, are delivered on paper, fiche, film or page-based COLD systems, and don't lend themselves to query or analysis. Report information is frozen on the page, actually on many thousands of pages, and offers little or no access to other computer resources. It requires that the pertinent facts, once located, be re-keyed into other systems, usually other office automation tools, for analysis. By contrast, databases, which have many promising attributes for relevant information retrieval, are designed to optimize the performance of on-line transaction processing systems, not to support user's daily ad-hoc problem-solving tasks. Databases usually lack the tools necessary to allow users to ask and answer business questions, and always demand comprehension of the technical data schema. The answer to endowing the reports with the capability of information provision lies in report mining technology. Report mining defined Report mining is a method for delivering meaningful information to business professionals. It uses reports as the source and pattern-making technology as a tool to enable report data for electronic access and interrogation. Report mining provides the mechanism for the automated discovery of information that is buried within inaccessible media. Report mining realizes reports as a new data source, and positions them not just as an output component, but as a dynamically integrated, analytical tool. Why reports? Reports have been designed to satisfy users' requirements for function-related information that supports their daily work; they provide a specific, line-of-business view. Precisely because they are meant to be read by human beings, they are inherently meaningful to business people. They are, however, challenging to query in an automated manner because the paper report is unavailable to a computer. To mine the valuable information buried in reports, you need tools that understand and can interpret the inherent report structure (or schema). You need the ability to identify fields by field type and length to allow for calculations, and to query against indexed and non-indexed fields, just as you would in a relational database, without the limitations that the relational database model imposes. Take, for example, the storage needs of financial institutions (which are legally required to retain seven years of transaction data), or hospitals (which must keep patient record data for 20 years). It would be far too costly, both in dollars and in the negative impact on system performance, to do this using relational databases. It is for this reason that data warehousing makes available only a subset and not "all data" for interrogation. Report mining technology, however, can offer consistent linear performance without sacrificing the amount of data available for query or the line-of-business view. Microbank's report mining product, Stor/QM, was first delivered five years ago. It supported the research requirements associated with Microbank's customer service case management software. Its use quickly spread to other departments that needed to mine vast amounts of report data to answer specific queries. The product interfaces with legacy systems and other aspects of a company's MIS environment and relieves information technology staff from the burden of continually writing and enhancing reports, which frees them to pursue strategic projects. Report mining in use today Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, the world's largest bank, introduced report mining in April of 1996. It is implemented on 50 personal computers in nine departments, including Customer Services, Accounts, Credit Control, Japanese Corporate Development and Treasury Back Office. Stor/QM report mining replaces printed reports as well as fulfilling other mission-critical requirements like these: * Financial Planning needs to produce accurate statistics for head office and management. Because of extensive volumes of transactions processed by the bank, the task of collating and consolidating information is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. By carefully planning and patterning key reports, and designing task-specific queries and views, Financial Planning now rapidly extracts data in minutes, not hours. Soon the extract facility will be further automated so that queries may be run from within Excel spreadsheets, in some cases automatically, overnight. * Customer Services needs to locate customer statements for inquiry purposes quickly. Statements are currently produced from five separate systems and are sent to Stor/QM. A statement overlay scanned into Stor/QM creates viewed or printed statements that look exactly like the originals. Statements can then be faxed or mailed to customers who request them. Stephen France, senior systems manager for end user computing at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, comments: "Stor/QM report mining has empowered users to solve queries instantaneously. At the present time, we are using Stor/QM exclusively for AS/400 reports, but plans are underway to add reports from other systems. The application will also be extended to other areas of the bank including loans administration, securities and the dealing room." Jeremy Bentley is VP of marketing for Microbank Software, 212-363-5600, fax 212-363-5891. Web site: http://www.microbank.com. E-mail: j.l.bentley@worldnet.att.net.
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