I would like to start with a quote from the late Steve Jobs “Many of the touch, content-interaction, and collaboration features that make tablets and smartphones so appealing for consumer use could also revolutionize the experience of BI, particularly for nontechnical users.”
Mobile BI has been in the wild for almost 3 years and few new players have got the first come advantage. There is still huge potentials for product development companies to capture the market. Many organizations have Mobile BI implementation in their current priority. This post focuses on Mobile BI implementation strategy for organizations who plan to start looking at the opportunities that mobile BI presents.
The 3 part series would cover
- Mobile BI Implementation Strategy
- Mobile BI Trends
- Current Landscape and Key Products Offerings
Mobile BI Implementation strategy
Before devising an implementation strategy, organizations need to be aware and justify the need for going mobile for BI. There are critical questions that business need to answer before they can start thinking about the strategy. I mention below some of the questions that businesses need to think
What problems do mobile BI address that are not addressed by traditional desktop BI?
- Mobility increases visibility
- Access to analytics whenever and everywhere.
- Enhances ease of use and Real Time access to critical data
Do you really need Mobile BI?
Change for the sake of change and going mobile BI for the sake of mobility would be a bad strategy. At the heart of BI usage is slicing and dicing data. If your mobile BI is going to serve only as a static reporting solution or an alerting solution, there are other solutions that serve that need. If your current desktop BI solution has a very low adoption among business user, it is very likely you might not see much success in your mobile BI implementation.
Addressing the BYOD ( Bring your own device ) phenomenon in your organization ?
With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, employees are demanding applications for their mobile devices to connect to enterprise resources, increase productivity and promote collaboration. Performing a survey of the current devices that employees are bringing and plan to use in the future could give valuable insights into the mobile ecosystem that need to be considered. Organizations also need to increasingly look at Enterprise Mobile Application Management ( EMAM ) to manage the delivery mechanism to the enterprise apps. If the organizations already have a EMAM solution, they can offload managing and deploying the apps to the administrators.
Create once, access from any device(Desktop/Tablets/Smartphones).Does the strategy work?
We likely should not look at mobile BI as a delivery mechanism for the existing desktop reports and analysis. The real estate space in these devices are different and effort needs to be put in place to make sure the most relevant content is delivered to these devices based on the screen size. So the consideration are different for the different screen sizes.
I would personally not prefer huge tables and multiple graphs in my mobile reports. The idea should likely be to present the most relevant and meaningful content to these mobile devices. Since the real estate space is smaller in smartphones and tablets, greater importance need to be given in choosing the best visualization techniques for a given analysis or report.
My take on Mobile BI strategy
Mobile BI is about getting the operational, finance, marketing and sales data available all day long to whoever needs it. It is for employees who need real time access to information to enhance decision making. However understanding the real value of taking decisions round the clock and making informed decisions is critical. Otherwise, the mobile BI app would be just another app on the employee’s iPhone along with Angry Birds..
The next in the series would cover the new trends in Mobile BI which will be followed a post on the landscape and the current product offerings
