Visualizing data: Using PowerPlay from Cognos Corp., a newspaper manager can see visually what a table of numbers means. Here, revenues for days of the week clearly show Tuesday to be the weakest day of seven.

Report generators add value, analysis when dumping data

As newspapers move toward being information -- not manufacturing -- companies, we've approached conquering information and data with the same determination as those who sought to conquer space, a continent or the New World.

Conquerors always influence the culture they come to dominate, especially its language. Perhaps that's one reason that not so long ago, casual conversation in the business-side aisles of newspaper technology conferences was filled with acronyms like SQL and Odbc. Participants could voice endless natter about the number of reports any given system could produce from any given database, and about how customizable they were.

It is not uncommon that the language of business conquest often appears first and most often in the speech of information technology types. If you inhabit that part of the world, expect to digest a broadened set of acronyms --Olap (Online Analytical Processing), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), BI (Business Information) or DSS (Decision Support System).

Virtual water-cooler chats may already be peppered with catch phrases like "drilling down," "cross-tabulation," "cube structures" (even "third-party cubes") or "multi-dimensional analysis tools."

Conquest is almost always achieved by using a new technology, or by using an old technology in a new way. It bears the promise of wealth, of uncovering rich new lodes of resources.

Newspapers see rich lodes in the data they own, and now are conquering the renewed frontier of report generation.

Solving the cube puzzle
Business and classified systems developed in the '70s and '80s had proprietary report generators, which were often cumbersome and difficult to use. The trend today is to go with a third-party report generator.

Publishing Business Systems of Des Plaines, Ill., is a perfect example. More than a year ago, the company established a business relationship with Cognos Corp. of Burlington, Mass. (with world headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), to incorporate Cognos' PowerPlay into the new PBS executive management tool.

The product, called InSight, has been live at advertising sites for more than a year, and is currently in beta testing at business sites. PBS has recently sold additional systems to 40 Thomson newspapers, as well as all of the newspapers of The McClatchy Co. of Sacramento.

One of the benefits of these new information tools, said Mary Olson, PBS' vice president of operations, is that PBS can sell them to newspapers not using the PBS system since they're not strictly tied to a particular product database.

Information from existing databases is exported into the PowerPlay application via programs called PowerCubes.

At the Times Publishing Co. in Erie, Pa., the cubes may, for example, pull up 13 or 14 months of data files on demand, said Advertising Director Dennis Sheely.

He is unrestrained in his praise of the PBS-Cognos combination. "It's fantastic," Sheely said. And the ties with PBS' Immediate program provide him with "the best sales tool I've ever used.

"I can look at ad activity for a particular advertiser," said Sheely. "I can also look at the revenue stream, and tell why revenue is down from a particular advertiser."

Over the weekend, operators build the "cubes" -- which establish the links between data files -- over an eight-hour period, then load them to each laptop or PC on Monday morning.

This approach, said Sheely, means that report-writing doesn't fight with other traffic on the mainframe system during production times. "It's lightning-fast with Cognos," Sheely said -- less than three minutes. He also finds it easy to use: "If you know Excel, you'll be a whiz."

Prior to the implementation of InSight, running a report could take up to 90 minutes. And if someone else ran the same report, it would take another 90 minutes, since the links between data had to be rebuilt every time the report was assembled.

The cubes function as a kind of secondary database to store current versions of most frequently accessed data so that reports can be prepared without slowing the production system. Sheely compares the cube-based applications both to the integrated functionality of the Microsoft Office environment as well as to a Rubik's Cube (the puzzle from the '70s-'80s), where you "twist it and look at information in different dimensions."

There are eight dimensions in the customized cube he uses for his reports: time periods, account reps and account base, publications, income statement, daily and Sunday, industries/category, days of the week and dollars.

The real benefit of the new products, according to Sheely, is their potential as time management tools. Because of their multi-dimensional quality, the new products let you view the equivalent of multiple reports spread out on the desk, the floors and the walls, as well as a picture of how all the data relate to one another.

Publishers and managers like the new product because they provide both breadth and depth in one report, allowing a broad general view as well as perspectives that can provide almost infinite detail about any or all fields in the report.

The effect is similar to that of a hyperlinked web page -- layered so that clicking on a hot-linked topic provides you with more detail on that topic. From there, you can either continue to drill down to other layers of detail on that subject, or return to the broader view -- the top layer (often a home page on the Web) to learn more about other topics.

By drilling down, for example, a user could click on a single week in a 13-month calendar of ad revenue to get additional detail -- about advertisers, sales people or linage.

Making reports crystal clear
Other suppliers have developed products or chosen third-party items to solve the report generation problem.

Both Publishing Partners International of Manchester, N.H., and Advanced Technical Solutions of Wilmington, Mass., are using Crystal Reports from Seagate Software of Scotts Valley, Calif. Both companies provide customers with a site license and a set of modifiable standard reports that can draw information from any Odbc-compliant database, such as Sybase or Oracle.

PPI incorporated Seagate's products into its own from the beginning.

"It's proven software," said Janice Ziemba, who handles marketing communications for PPI. "It's an industry standard, and provides multiple database connectivity."

Crystal Reports, said Jon Daly, marketing manager for ATS, shows the database fields as visual objects, in much the same way as FileMaker Pro, for example. Also, it doesn't require formulae to produce reports, since more than 160 functions are included with the application. And since Crystal Reports is an off-the-shelf product, customers usually can find product training locally -- for instance, at a nearby community college.

Jerry Jennings, who is information systems director for the Newspaper Agency Corp. in Salt Lake City, agrees that Crystal Reports appears to be a good product. He has had a brief time with it: The ATS system used by the provider of non-editorial services for the 130,000-circulation morning Salt Lake Tribune and 68,000-circulation evening Deseret News was installed in March.

Jennings runs Crystal Reports against a Sybase database, and says the people who use the reporting function like it, in part because they had a lot of input into customizing the standard reports, and in part because reports from the old system "looked like a core dump."

Jennings has found that all of the ATS-provided report templates can run quickly and allow users to change criteria. And he likes the ability to drag-and-drop a report to a screen, a file or a printer. But despite being easier to use than many other report writers he knows, Jennings believes that "it still takes nearly a programmer. You need to know the logic."

SQL searches in particular can get technical, he said.

Atex Media Solutions Inc. of Bedford, Mass., offers customers the option of using either the home-grown Atex report writer or third-party applications, said Wendy Bruce, the company's senior advertising product manager.

Among Atex newspaper customers is a large group using Microsoft's Excel, one site with Crystal Reports and another with SQR. A soon-to-be-installed site in the Northwest expects to use the Cognos product.

On the other hand, Software Consulting Services of Nazareth, Pa., has written its own, SCS-specific SpiceRAQ reporting software. Like the other packages described, it allows customization, combining information from many different files to produce one report. Three levels of tools -- 5GL, 4GL and 3GL -- allow users different levels of access to customization.

In appearance, said Richard Cichelli, the company's president, the report writer resembles Intuit's Quicken more than FileMaker Pro.

SpiceRAQ has been a part of SCS products for several years, said Kurt Jackson, vice president of operations.

"The user can set up the database with any text file, export to a database, view the report on screen or paper, and even move the reports to other applications," Jackson said. "The exporting function is particularly popular."

Data are turned into information the moment the human mind apprehends it. Just as editors and reporters frame information in order to create news that readers can use as a guide for decision-making in daily life, report writing software takes bits and bytes of information -- data -- from a database and turns it into information.

That's where the new report writers excel: They create a framework that provides managers with analytical tools that offer not only the information a manager asks for, but the equivalent of news -- something she needs to make informed business decisions. The goal is to provide the kind of analysis that makes it easier for managers to quickly spot trends and exceptions, without requiring an investment in learning the intricacies of a particular database.

You may anticipate the pleasure derived from your ability to conquer not only one database, but many "data sources" or "data markets" -- to tame them and force them to yield, in minutes, an analysis that once was either impossible to get, or so time-consuming that it was virtually so.

After all, there is nothing in the new group of database report writers that couldn't have been had from stacks of paper piled into several billion manila file folders, some graph paper and a few legal pads -- and anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred hours.

-- L. Carol Christopher

Advanced Technical Solutions, (978) 657-6500, e-mail: info@atsusa.com
Atex Media Solutions Inc., (781) 275-2323, e-mail: info@atex.com
Cognos Corp., (781) 229-6600
Publishing Business Systems, (847) 699-572
Publishing Partners International, (603) 644-3339, e-mail: 73301.2652@compuserve.com
Seagate Software, (604) 681-3435, e-mail: info@seagatesoftware.com
Software Consulting Services, (610) 837-8484, e-mail: scs@nscs.fast.net.

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.