Your firm has just completed its implementation of APX. All systems are go including a small collection of SSRS reports, which meet some but probably not all of your firm’s requirements. You have new reporting capabilities, and now the question is “will your firm ever use these new features?” SSRS is also known as Microsoft Reporting Services, which sounds a little less complicated. No matter what the name is, SSRS is a beast – the following issues will challenge your firm’s ability to embrace and leverage SSRS technology for the foreseeable future.
1. TOOL INSTALLATION – SSRS tools like Report Builder and Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) will not be installed on most of your PCs. They are kept at an arms-length from most users, and rightfully so. Though SQL Server Manager and SSRS reporting tools can be accessed on the database server, it currently isn’t Advent Software’s policy to install the applications that give users access to these tools on all users’ PCs. Assuming you have someone at your office with relevant report-writing experience, getting their system configured to make SSRS reports and/or modifications is special request. I have worked with many APX users. By default, most of them do not have access to the tools, so they could not use them or even see them. Some firms using APX 3.x do not even have access to SSRS reports because they have not been installed.
2. ENVIRONMENTAL COMPLEXITY – Once the tools have been installed, the collection of SSRS reports is open to users’ review and modification, but the infrastructure and understanding it requires is cumbersome. Most APX users do not have the skills necessary to create SSRS reports, and very few of those who do are interested in doing it. For those unfamiliar with SSRS and other similar report-writing tools, seemingly simple reporting modifications can be a pain if datasets aren’t designed with your specific reporting needs in mind. Those writing reports need to make frequent backups. Occasionally, reports can become corrupted and cause their writers to lose hours of work.
3. TIME – Compared to creating compound reports and building reports using Advent Report Writer Pro, developing reports using SSRS and other similar report writers like Crystal takes much more time. This is the norm, but not the rule. There are specific report-writing tasks that SSRS is more efficient at performing, but overall report-writing with SSRS is exponentially more complex than using Advent’s standard report-writing tools. This is due to the fact that SSRS development and modifications are the domain of Business Intelligence (BI) professionals and other system integrators who do it for a living. Report Writer Pro and compound reporting were developed by Advent to be used by investment operations end-users with limited technical know-how. SSRS was created by Microsoft, and is not designed with these same users in mind. Some simple SSRS reports take minutes to create, but it is much more likely for users to spend hours, weeks or even months working on reports.
4. COST – Since your firm is unlikely to have BI report developer resources internally, you will need to hire outside resources to develop your reports. That sounds familiar, right? Assuming that you, like many Advent APX clients, spend somewhere around 100k to 200k annually on APX, you can expect to pay at least another 15k to 30k annually to get the reports you want and keep them maintained by qualified third-party resources. You may be able to get the work done cheaper, but anyone delivering reporting services on a platform this complex at a significantly lower price will not be in business for long.
5. AVAILABILITY OF QUALIFIED RESOURCES – Since SSRS is still relatively new to Advent users, there are very few BI resources available with specific experience working for APX users. The learning curve is steep. Significant integration and reporting work needs to be done for individual firms to fully embrace SSRS as their reporting platform, and short-term that leads to a smaller pool of available resources to do the work.
RUNNING WITH SSRS
Due to the complexity inherent in combining various data elements via SSRS and workflow automation, some APX users may still be better off using the REPLANG and compound report functionality first introduced in Axys. Standardizing your firm’s reports using SSRS on Advent’s APX platform could be tough. For many users, standardizing will mean trying to make standard (REPLANG) reports look like they were created in SSRS, or worse, completely reengineering those reports in SSRS.
Advent deserves credit for implementing SSRS. It is a progressive move aimed at satisfying the enterprise users for which APX was designed, but some firms using APX should ask themselves whether they truly are an “enterprise” before they start implementing tools designed for enterprises. (In the near future, I will be blogging on the issue of firm identity and the role it plays in the success or failure of technology implementations.)
Long-term, there is good news for many APX users. Though creating reports can be very complex, the format of SSRS reports is extremely portable, which should eventually lead to more report sharing among APX users. Unfortunately, while this may be good news for APX users, BI developers and integrators like ISITC have to be more concerned with the portability of their end product.
One could literally spend hundreds of hours developing a report and have someone walk away with it. In other stickier environments, reports might be developed at a discount, but an integrator’s sunk costs could easily be recouped through a nearly guaranteed long-term maintenance agreement. Given concerns regarding portability, you should expect to pay a premium to have SSRS reports developed for your firm.
Firms making a significant investment to develop distinctive reports in APX now should be equally concerned with maintaining those reports in the future. Advent and third parties that create reporting solutions regularly make updates to address bugs and/or add functionality to reports. Though APX users may not realize it, this environment is still fairly sticky. Those unfamiliar with specific reports can easily perform the simplest modifications, but firms will do well to retain those that write their SSRS reports to address more complex modifications in the future.
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About the Author: Kevin Shea is President of InfoSystems Integrated, Inc. (ISI); ISI provides a wide variety of outsourced IT solutions to investment advisors nationwide. For details, please visit isitc.com, contact Kevin Shea via phone at 617-720-3400 x202 or e-mail at kshea@isitc.com.