Historically, the information technology group or department has been beseeched by a variety of business users to produce and provide reports showing information stored in databases and systems that are of interest.
These ad hoc reporting requests have evolved into requests for on-demand raw data extracts (rather than formatted or pretty printed reports) so that business users could then import the extracted data into a tool such as MS Excel (or others), where they could then perform their own formatting and reporting, or perform further analysis and modeling. In today's world, business users demand more self-service (even mobile) abilities to meet their organization's (or an individual's) analytical and reporting needs, ...
