A few decades back Mobile Phones were widely used for Voice Calls and Texting. As the technology advanced one can see the other person interacting through Video calling. Sales / Marketing / Executives / Delegates on travel used to get offline information by ways of emails and updates in their mobile phones, which was useful to some extent but were lacking with current or accurate information that were need of the hour for them during their client visits.

Thanks to the invention of Smart Phones in the mid of 2000, that was the beginning of Mobile Revolution. Mobile manufacturers have increased the Screen size, came up with touch screens and the usability and performance rapidly improved. The Smart Phone market enabled the Business Intelligence tools promoters to expand their innovation and come up with the Business Intelligence Solution in Mobile Devices. They grasped this idea and provided developers a capable platform to start developing mobile BI application, Hurray! today we have Business Intelligence in Mobile Devices.

Business Intelligence can be accessed from Mobile Devices by the following ways:

  • Business Intelligence application designed for a specific mobile operating systems such as iOS, Android, etc.
  • Any mobile browsers using which the Business Intelligence application can be accessed on the web

Both the above approaches have their own pros and cons as expressed below and it is up to the business users to determine which suits them the best.

  • BI applications designed for the mobile operating systems will have greater functionality and can be optimized based on the mobile devices. They may not be compatible with all mobile platforms.
  • Browser based BI applications can be deployed easily and will be compatible with all mobile browsers. They will have less functionality when compared with mobile BI applications as they were designed for specific mobile operating systems.

Business Intelligence on mobile devices is one of the hottest and quickly evolving spaces in the software industry and it is gaining adoption as many leading organizations and executives around the world are moving towards it.

Mobile business intelligence enables the business users to access the customary BI components like dashboards and reports to distribute information in a mobile-friendly way through tablets, smartphones etc. Mobile business intelligence provides a platform that ensures the remote employees to connect to their corporate systems anytime, even while on the road. With the help of Mobile BI, the remote users are able to access business information anytime from anywhere and they get most recent information to take immediate action as required.

Desktop BI Vs Mobile BI

Now-a-days, the mobile market is changing almost every week in terms of devices, operating systems, and support for different types of content. The user inputs need to be designed as mobile-friendly so that users can easily access, type, and make changes to what they see on a smaller screen.

The Desktop BI application is widely used to execute summary reports with drill-downs for executives and management.

The Mobile BI application is intended to enable employees on the road to generate orders and initiate automated emails and alerts. The functionality and the look & feel of Desktop BI and Mobile BI will be different. Explore for a BI tool that supports both types of applications that provides the flexibility to reuse as much content as possible without losing functionality or ease of use.

Even though the mobile business intelligence provides instant access to corporate data it does have a few limitations as below:

  • Many mobile BI apps permit users to only access data and they do not allow handling the data.
  • Mobile BI apps are the interfaces for publishing the dashboards, documents and contents, but not for analytics
  • Mobile BI apps lack in user interaction and limit the users to drill down into data, such as product-wise, region-wise profits.

Points to Ponder when choosing a Mobile Business Intelligence solution:

The below are the points to ponder when choosing a Mobile Business Intelligence Solution to outspread your Enterprise BI platform:

  • Explore for a mobile BI solution with dashboard having same features when accessed from tablets or on desktops.
  • Explore for a mobile BI solution that enables the remote users to build novel reports or dashboards on an ad-hoc basis in their tablets to meet inadvertent customer requirements.
  • Make sure the mobile BI solution that you have explored doesn’t store business information on the mobile device. The business data can be backed up with mobile device management (MDM) and incase the tablet is lost or stolen the IT staff can wipe off the corporate data from the tablets.

So, if you are already using an Enterprise BI platform, it is time to go for a Mobile BI solution. Empower your sales team to view your client account history on the fly, tailor your price, create a quote on the spot and convert the quote into an order. With Mobile BI apps all of this can be synced back to your corporate data.

Change the way you do the business 🙂
 

image

Case study on design and development of ETL and reporting framework

We helped in migrating to an ETL and reporting framework using contemporary technologies.

 

Latest posts by Vinodh Bhaskaran (see all)