Countrywide Report Tracker
A web app that supports search, discovery and tracking for hundreds of internal use reports.
Situation
Managing a large reporting footprint is a common problem in large corporations. Report Tracker is a custom web application that supports Countrywide’s (now Bank of America) Infrastructure Technology team. The three primary customer segments receive the following benefits:
- Front Line Helpdesk Analysts: the purpose of the report and its data sources.
- Business Analysts and Developers: identification of reports that perform similar purposes. This helps limit the proliferation of duplicative and niche reports.
- End Users:discovery of reports to help manage their business lines.
My involvement
I met with members from each group. These meetings began with dialogue about the types of questions they needed to answer. Though my team had developed a working prototype, we wanted to independently verify our assumptions before presenting our work.
Luckily, our prototype tracked closely to their needs. We did identify one key area where we could improve their experience. Our research found that their search strategies were highly variable. One group preferred hierarchical navigation whereas another preferred text searches. Furthermore, search methods varied depending upon the questions being asked.
With this in mind, we focused on exposing different yet complementary methods for accessing the information. This included:
- A hierarchical, fixed taxonomy: this reflected the nested directories that physically stored the reports.
- A controlled vocabulary: this reflected the fields returned, parameters used, databases queried and other non-ambiguous metadata
- A keyword system: this reflected the tags that were used to annotate the reports. This will also help us cluster similar reports on the fly.
- A qualified search: this reflected the text search that a user can “tune” to restrict results to only certain metadata elements, like field names
