Case-Study: Everett Housing Authority Cuts Costs By Extending Self-Service Reporting

Challenge:
Provide Users With Customized Reporting Without Burdening Valuable IT Resources

For over 60 years the Everett Housing Authority (EHA) has been committed to serving the housing needs of the people of Everett, Washington. Critical to supporting this commitment is providing staff across four departments with information that is up-to-the-minute and easily accessible in order to optimize decision making without burdening IT with numerous custom report requests.

"Our users would often call on IT with custom reporting requests, which were a considerable cost for us since that meant IT had less time to handle other important projects", says Paul Erickson, Computer Services Coordinator at Everett Housing Authority. "Providing easy-to-use self-service ad-hoc reporting for our users was critical".

Solution:
Easy-to-Use Self-Service Reporting & Analysis At the recommendation of their solution provider, Progenixx, EHA chose Informer Web Reporting software for its ease of use, its low-cost pricing model, and its modern, easy-to-use web interface. Informer's built-in query engine enables both technical and non-technical users at EHA to generate ad-hoc reports based on LIVE data.

With Informer, Everett HA users can initiate high-level queries, then immediately dig into the underlying details. Reports can then be analyzed and data elements arranged on the fly based on the specific needs and requirements of each end user without any IT assistance.

Results:
Rapid Rollout & Quick Adoption of Powerful Ad-hoc Reporting & Analysis Capabilities

End users at Everett now have an intuitive, powerful way to navigate through organizational data.

"Our implementation of Informer has been very successful", says Erickson. "Hundreds of custom reports are being utilized by our end users every day." Informer presents information in drag-and-drop form to give users choices in how they want to assemble, schedule and deliver reports.

The result is improved time to decision and end-user satisfaction, drastically reducing the cost of creating, maintaining and delivering reports.

"Informer gave users the power to write and manipulate their own reports rather than rely on IT, while saving time and duplicated work with the ability to share reports and schedule them", says Erickson.