In my previous post, I talked about the first major trend in BI – Analytics for the masses.
Today, let’s talk about the second most popular trend in Analytics – Mobility – as I see it evolving at my various Retail, Manufacturing and Financial Services clients. With Social Media and Networking taking over our lives, decisions – all types of critical decisions – buying, selling, monitoring, optimizing decisions – are being made on the fly – at airports, in the cars, at home, in meetings and even while shopping. This kind of “on your tips” decision-making, where the decision-maker gets access to a flashy dashboard or a tabular report on a mobile device and is able to make game-changing decisions, is increasingly becoming a major trend in this space.
Some of the key Mobile Analytics trends (and issues) that we are increasingly being asked about by our clients are outlined below:
- How to get real-time access to data – structured or unstructured – and effectively leverage predictive analytics is becoming a common discussion item in our various Executive sessions. As a matter of fact, it would be safe to conclude that being able to take this a step further and combine it with algorithmically-sophisticated data visualizations “on the go” is the holy grail for the next-gen “real-time big data-analytics-mobile enterprise”.
- Advanced analytics capability on mobile devices for customer-facing personnel is very quickly becoming a necessity too. But, the realization that these dashboards are still more or less stripped-down versions of their counterparts running on a thick client, with limited interactivity, has not really sunk in yet.
- Which Mobile BI Vendor stack to go with is also a primary factor in this discussion. As the BI Marketplace continues to see a proliferation of native applications on various mobile platforms, an increasing number of our clients are looking for research data that supports native or browser-based BI apps on standard mobile platforms.
Bottom-line, since our dependence on mobile media tablets and smartphones will continue to grow over time, it is only pertinent that companies focus not only on ways to develop and implement these mobile BI apps, but also look at ways to emphasize the “cool” factor in doing BI on mobile devices. This is what will ultimately drive user/customer adoption of real-time analytics on the mobile platform.
Previous Entries:
Emerging Trends in Analytics – Part I
Read More:
Emerging Trends in Analytics – Part III
Emerging Trends in Analytics – Part IV
Neetu, have you already seen clients who are using mobile devices for this purpose? It would seem rather difficult to interpret ananlytics from a cell phone!
I am consulting with a lot of manufacturing, retail and financial services giants that are actively prototyping analytics for mobile, cloud environments…Some have even gone live with their first release of these apps. So, yes, companies really are focusing on developing dashboards for mobile tablets.
As for the look and feel and interpretation issues, there are best practices by vendor technology, which when employed accurately, can effectively mitigate these concerns. That’s what our Business Analytics consultants specialize in.