Posted by Matt Caesar on Wed, Jun 17, 2009 @ 03:00 PM
Creating
software that simply collects information is an easy task that any company can do. Actually, it's so easy, I wouldn't suggest spending
any money on a system that just did that. The real differentiator among software packages is how they allow users and administrators to accurately report on the data contained in the system. If your software package is unable to produce the reports that you need, you are wasting your time using it.
Anyone who has any experience entering data into a system, whether it be time tracking software or even a simple inventory system, will ultimately want a report out of the system that doesn't exist. This very well might be one of the most frustrating issues facing end users today.
Throughout my years in the software industry, I have learned that no two people are ever interested in the same report. As a software company, how do you manage that? I guess you could tell your users ‘this is all we have' or ‘hey, everyone else loves it', but that is not what people want to hear. At DSI we integrate our software with standard reporting tools and provide either custom reports, or train users to use the reporting tool on their own. It's a good start, but how many customers have extra staff or time to work on custom reports?
To combat this, we have attacked the problem in a few different ways. First, every report that we create, whether it is for our standard product offerings or custom reports we create during a project, is created using our reporting tool and made available to our user community. Second, we constantly offer refresher trainings for our reporting tool at our annual user groups. Third, we allow users to share their reports with each other via our Customer Forum. Combined, these approaches allow our end users to constantly refine and improve upon the already extensive reporting built into our software products.