For each of our media properties, we keep regular tabs on important KPI’s like new members, subscribers, forum posts and the like. Each month, each business creates a monthly report from these KPI’s using data from the websites and some custom Excel programming that we’ve done. It’s a little cumbersome and prone to errors and mistakes.

The proper way to do it would be to use some reporting suite like JasperReports to create a reporting portal for each business – but time just has not allowed to look into this.

But there might be another way. With the move to SaaS providers in many areas of business, I guess it was only a matter of time for this to move into the Business Intelligence space. I’ve recently come across the GoodData system, which looks quite interesting. It’s effectively a fully outsourced BI reporting platform, running on Amazon EC2. I’m yet to fully put it through it’s paces, but initially, the ability to create reports, present dashboards, control user access through privileges & upload data either through a web interface or via APIs all looks very promising – especially for the current price.. Free!

I hope to get some time to give it a proper trial soon, but this space is definitely hotting up – as I noticed Rightscale have teamed with Jaspersoft to offer BI inthe Cloud also.