Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
shown the flashlight onto a spot in the room, and recorded the observa-
tions of that area, there is no need to shine the Analysis Flashlight onto
that area again. Rather than shine the Analysis Flashlight onto the same
spot repeatedly, each time documenting the same observations, instead
you shine the Analysis Flashlight onto a different spot, documenting the
new observations in new spot each time. After a series of separate obser-
vations, you begin to create a map of what is in the darkness of the room.
Eventually, the darkness is not so dark because your map tells you where
everything is located. That is how you use the Analysis Flashlight.
The Reporting Flashlight, however, is used in a c ompletely different
manner. The map of the dark room provided by the Analysis Flashlight
identified the location of a chair in the corner of the dark room. The
Reporting Flashlight daily shines its light on the chair in the corner to
verify the chair is still there. For days on end the Reporting Flashlight
shines its light and for days on end the chair remains in the corner. Then
one day, the Reporting Flashlight shines its light on the corner and the
chair is no longer there. The chair has moved. You know where the chair
has been for a long time, and that the chair has moved. That is how you use
the Reporting Flashlight. The word
monitoring
has more of the connota-
tion of the daily reports that watch the world within and around the enter-
prise. The Prior Day Sales report uses the word
report
, and for that reason
we think of it as reporting. But what is really happening is that you are
watching, or monitoring, your enterprise through the lens of Sales. When
the same query generates similar data for two thousand consecutive days,
you're monitoring, not analyzing. Then, when on a single day, the answer
to the query in its two thousand and first iteration is an unusual and unex-
pected value (maybe very high, maybe very low) you close the Prior Day
Sales report and begin to do the analysis to figure out what just happened.
When the chair in the dark room moves, and you know it moved via the
Reporting Flashlight, you again use the Analysis Flashlight to again find
the chair. Through a series of observations, the Analysis Flashlight maps
the dark room until it finds the chair again. Once found, the Reporting
Flashlight monitors the chair in its new location. Because the dark room
is a changing world, this process repeats constantly. In a flexible and
agile environment, the Analysis Flashlight and Reporting Flashlight look
extremely similar, so similar in fact that they are sometimes confused
with each other. The real distinction is not in the flashlight. The distinc-
tion is the methods by which they are used, and the goals they achieve.
This confusion between analytics and reporting caused by a c ommon
