Centralize Reporting

For many years there was no central place to request reports at CSU, Chico. The campus has over 3000 staff members. When requests for data are made to random decentralized sources, miscommunication, chaos and disorganization reigned.

We were tasked to centralize reporting, which after investigating, realized meant a change in the culture of the organization in regards to gathering data.

The first task was to identify an enterprise reporting tool. The second task was to get all the developers on board. Without a mandate to use one tool, getting 75 developers to stop delivering data the way they are used to and use some new tool was not going to be easy. After using my best efforts to sell the concept and tool to the group, a small minority remained who refused to leave their homegrown systems and would not succumb to cheer leading.

So the responsibility of centralizing reporting without the authority to enforce on developers rested on our shoulders. After a few months of not being able to have the outlying developers to convert their ways we decided to take a different angle. The Solution: A One Stop Shop for data which would eliminate the need for all reports to live in one tool which pulls data from a report library. Developers would submit the reports they created, description of the report, and the system it is created and delivered through and the One Stop Shop would be the “portal” for the different systems.

The One Stop Data Shop was successfully created and deployed September 2008 and can be found at http://data.csuchico.edu

Programming Language: C#, ASP.NET, PL/SQL
Database: Oracle