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Mobile Business Intelligence: A Primer
by: Tom Meers, President and Principle Consultant
Every three to five years a new trend emerges in the
information technology industry. First, the PC offered “personal” control
over how data was collected, manipulated and presented. Later,
client-server concepts in database management made it possible to develop and
deploy database driven solutions for workgroups and larger user communities in
less time and at a lower cost than traditional mainframe solutions. More
recently the Web has held the limelight and it seems almost impossible to
encounter someone who is less than proficient at “surfing” the Internet.
In the last year or so the newest trend has been centered on “wireless”
technology and, more specifically, mobile solutions. These concepts range
from allowing you to use your laptop computer at the nearby coffee shop, to
watching TV and movies on your cell phone. Consumer interests in music, music
videos, movies and text messaging have driven the establishment of adequate
infrastructure to bring the concept of Business Intelligence (BI) to mobile
devices.
Some BI vendors have recently released mobile Business
Intelligence offerings that allow you to access and interact with reports and
analytics on mobile devices. These offerings represent an interest by the
business community to expand the concept of information dashboards to include
the visualization of data from almost anywhere and at anytime. Mobile BI
can take several forms just as other mobile solutions might. Since most
modern PDA’s and cell phones include a Web browser, mobile versions of Web pages
and Web applications make it relatively easy to create solutions that can be
consumed by mobile users. This approach to mobile BI, while viable, has
some issues that limits its capabilities. First, Web applications must
render all text and graphics to the local device (PDA or cell phone) with each
change of a page or view. Your normal computer’s Web browser most likely
supports newer Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX which makes the viewing experience
much more robust. However, these features have yet to find their way into
the mobile Web browser environment. For this reason, coupled with the fact
the speed of Web browsing from mobile devices is still very slow makes browser
based mobile solutions questionable. After all if it’s slow, hard to read
and limited in functionality one must question how much anyone will use it.
This is especially true of road warriors such as sales people and regional managers
who don’t have the time or patience to fiddle with technology.
Leading solutions, like those from Business Objects, adopt
a more sophisticated approach to the deployment of mobile BI. These
solutions are developed as software applications that can be installed on the
mobile device via an Internet connection and execute as a local software program
that leverages the Internet as a means to access data. This approach has
several advantages. Because certain aspects of the graphical interface
are common they can be rendered locally which reduces bandwidth requirements and
improves performance. Additionally, an application running on a mobile
device can cache data further reducing the amount of information it has to wait
for to produce a new view. These features, among others like direct
integration with cell phone features, make mobile BI capable of such things as
drill-down and real time manipulation of analytics like gauges and charts.
It also makes it possible to use data from a report or dashboard to
automatically dial a phone number or send a text message while performing an
analysis of the business (very cool stuff).
Mobile BI is still young, but thanks to the rapid evolution
of the mobile infrastructure and some crafty coding from leading vendors it is
viable and relevant now. It will improve, but it is worth a closer look
today if your organization suffers from lost time and slow response due to
limited hotel Internet connectivity or hassles associated with lugging laptops
everywhere you go. For more information about mobile BI solutions give us
a call at Result Data. We can fill you in on the specifics and we have
several customers in the process of rolling it out so we can share some insights
into best practices.
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