A Model for Guiding Consumption of Information

Health care organizations have arrived late to the use of other tools that retrieve data, highlight information, and afford interactivity.

Look at the tools available from Microsoft, listed in the order of power and degree of interactivity.

Reports (Reporting Services) variants:

• Static Reports
• Parameter Driven
• Simulated Drill Down

Report Builder

Analysis Services

Data Mining Toolkit

The Reporting Cycle

Hospital IT outfits start with Reporting Services. Often, however, the crush to meet the endless need results in the cutural assumption that the need must be met with "reports": They become an end unto themselves.

Reports require that a programmer/designer/business analyst be employed to design and vet the structures. The organization simply can't produce fast enough to meet the expectations of the subject matter experts. Many of these experts wish to "surf" on the data to uncover hidden patterns - but the development cycle simply does not permit reports to be tailored quickly enough.

Some of the other tools in the above arsenal permit the experts to develop their own tools to consume information. As IT managers, when and how do you unleash each tool? An overall framework is necessary.

One taxonomy, the CIF (Corporate Information Factory), that is widespread was published several years ago by Claudia Imhoff and her colleagues. The groups briefly are:

1. Farmers (financial analysts) have well defined requirements. Queries are clear and concise. Data marts and OLAP are often used.
2. Tourist (executives) search large amounts of data to anticipate and respond to events. Data marts and OLAP are often used.
3. Operators require current detailed information on a scheduled bases. Reports largely suffice to meet this need in the health care vertical.
4. Explorers search for new patterns and relationships. Random queries are often generated. Results can lead to observations that range from the mundane to the spectacular. Ad hoc tools are employed.

Each group can be matched up with each retreival tools. Each determines the type of load on the database servers (ad hoc vs. schedule reports). In the early days of SQL 7, Microsoft published a large wall poster with this classification.

Further information on the Corporate Information Factory can be found at http://download.101com.com/pub/tdwi/files/Critical_Shift_to_Flex_BI_Imhoff.pdf .