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Users May Need to Re-Process Data
The unidirectional waterfall approach (technical staff extracting warehouse data from enterprise systems and giving the data to end users so the latter can slice and dice them into reports) is not always enough. Nor is prototyping. Further re-programming may be required before final reports are generated. It is more like a concoction method of slicing, dicing, merging, and re-programming based on a recipe that varies depending on intermediate results. Sometimes a dash of salt is added to the mix. The salt may be variable or fixed parameters, formulas or even soft data that are added at certain points to make the reports meaningful. To support a concoction approach, close coordination between end users and programmers is essential. The other extreme is to have data miners that are both technical and data experts. Either arrangement is usually supported by specialized hardware/software platform. Both solutions are expensive. The alternative is to keep things simple: 1. give end users a simple, flexible, fast and powerful tool to allow them to write programs and reports without technical assistance 2. using simple file structures that they can fix on their own 3. carrying out tasks many times faster than traditional methods. GenRe is a tool that makes this alternative possible. |