Thursday, December 31, 2015

Let's categorize users involved in Reporting Scenarios

We either author or consume reports which makes us a part of some Reporting Scenario. Regardless of the activities users perform, users can be fallen into common role based on their involvement. Here are some of the roles noticed and identified, this will be useful specially on documentation and making proposals.


  • Database/Application Developer
    A professional software engineer who works mainly on databases and building application. This person creates reports as a part of application development and will work more on formal/tabular reports.

  • BI Developer
    A professional BI developer creates special reports such as analytical reports, interactive reports and dashboard reports connecting with data marts and data warehouses. BI developer works more on data warehousing and BI than general OLTP database related solutions.

  • IT Professional
    This role plays a technical role that always involves with infrastructure such as servers and network. This role includes job type such as database administrator, IT administrator and they rarely work with reports. However, they might involve with creating reports for their work and requirement received from other users, specifically business users.

  • Power User
    Power user is not considered as a technical professional but a business user who have thorough knowledge on the domain and business. This role is played by professionals like business analyst or account who do not have much knowledge on development but uses special tools for creating their own reports with the knowledge they have for analysis they want to perform.
  • Information Worker
    Just like Power User, Information Worker a business user who involves only with consumption. This person uses data available with reports for doing various analysis mainly for decision-making and hold no knowledge on technical implementations of them.
There can be many other roles and classifications in terms of report development and consumption. Any missing common ones?

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