Collaborative reporting is a new business intelligence practice that encourages participation among a diverse user and producer community. The fundamental concept is simple: report developers and consumers jointly evolve reports as they use them.

This practice encourages iterative development, rewards active participation, and reduces IT reporting costs.

It dissolves the tension between users and IT Organizations spend extraordinary amounts of time and energy negotiating reporting requirements among IT, business analysts and end users. IT groups are unable to provide access to the data until they understand what the users want. Correspondingly, end users can't explain what they want until they see the data that IT won't release. This standoff results in tension between IT, business analysts and end users, which slows projects down, increases costs and lowers participation. Collaborative reporting dissolves the tension by capitalizing on the convergence of open source, interactivity through Web 2.0 technologies and SOA to transform traditional BI projects into business intelligence processes specifically geared toward improving the performance of the organization.

The Collaborative Reporting Architecture represents a breakthrough in BI by bringing not only technology, but also the principals of open source development, into reporting applications of any size and complexity. These principles--participation, iterative development and modularity--help break down the traditional barriers to adoption of BI, speed deployment and lower BI-related costs.