How to Take Control of SumTotal Advanced Reporting

SumTotal Advanced Reporting is a powerful tool. It has dozens of out-of-the-box reports, enabling you to create custom datasets and reports.

To achieve the maximum value Advanced Reporting offers, we want to recommend practices to help you standardize and manage it better. These methods have served our clients well, and we hope you can take advantage of our experience.

Governance

Our first and primary suggestion is an organization-wide data governance program, where good data management starts.

Your practices in using SumTotal Advanced Reporting should fall under your organization’s data governance policy. If you don’t have a data governance function, we recommend you get with your executives to start a conversation about it.

If you need information on how to get started, you can visit the Data Governance Institute, download our eBook, or call us. We’ll be happy to help you get started.

Naming Governance

In our two decades of reporting design and consulting, we’ve seen the sad result when organizations didn’t use a disciplined approach to writing names:

• Analysts are frustrated by scrolling through dozens of cryptic report names to find the one they need.
• An analyst can spend hours creating a report only to find someone had already created it, but the name didn’t tell them what it contained.
• Executives are frustrated because they don’t have the information they need to make decisions.

First, let’s discuss the governance aspect of naming conventions. We’ve seen many organizations that started with good intentions but didn’t follow through.

• Train everyone who creates reports on naming conventions and inform them when you change the standards.
• Apply the standards to every custom object.
• Create custom reports that alert administrators to report names that don’t follow the rules. Follow up frequently so you don’t create a backlog.
• Reinforce standards with frequent communication.

Suggested Standards for Object Names

• Use plain language. A new user should be able to see a report name and understand the context.
• Use abbreviations only if they are common acronyms or easily understood in the context of the name.
• If a name allows spaces, use title case. If it doesn’t allow spaces, use camel case (ThisIsCamelCase).
• Be specific. Avoid general terms such as “Completion Report.”
• If you create a report, you will use only for a short time, identify it with a “Temporary” suffix or add an expiration date (- Expires 31-DEC-2023). Schedule a periodic purge of obsolete reports.
• Don’t use ampersands. The “&” character can cause problems when you import data into other applications.
• Use hyphens only if they are what a user would type in a search. If a user typed in “enrollments for course 3124” a report named “enrollments-course 3124” wouldn’t appear in a search. When you need to use it as a separator, put a space before and after the hyphen.
• For country and region codes, use ISO standards. The International Standard Organization maintains both 2-letter and 3-letter codes. Also, make other geographical labels meaningful.

Server Load Management

Generating a large dataset can consume resources that affect other users and vital processes. A resource-heavy process can slow down your servers to where they affect dozens or hundreds of users.

SumTotal recommends scheduling large data extracts to avoid slowdowns, but we suggest taking this practice a step further by communicating with other users. Scheduling large data sets for the wee hours of the morning is a good idea unless every report analyst does it at the same time. Your servers will automatically prioritize the data traffic, but the load still might exceed what they can handle.

Daily overnight ETL (Extract, Transfer, and Load) processes will ensure your data is no more than 24 hours old. This practice will avoid heavy loads during peak traffic time.

Consider the Skill Levels of Your People

Inexperienced users may need to become more familiar with filters, crosstab summaries, and other advanced reporting features. Provide on-screen support as much as possible and take the time to train users on the features you provide. We’ve had great success training power users in each part of the organization to assist new users.

Create Dashboards

Your learners, managers, and executives need insights they can grasp without manipulating data. You can do that nicely using the visualization tools in SumTotal.

We recommend using Jaspersoft Studio to take advantage of the advanced formatting options.

See our tips for designing dashboards for more information.

Other Considerations

• Require training for users appropriate to their roles and retrain when roles change.
• Provide Jaspersoft training to your reports developers. The proper training will help your users create better visual displays. Much of the training is free, and the cost of paid training is reasonable.
• Take advantage of security inheritance instead of creating security permissions for each object. It may help to diagram your folders and reports and their security requirements.

We hope these tips help you improve your experience with SumTotal Advanced Reporting. The effort you put into managing your reports in SumTotal LMS will help you save time and reduce costs. Most important, it will help you measure and improve the impact of enterprise learning on your business.

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