Taking intel to the pineapple fields
Brian Gentile looks at how far mobile business intelligence has come and how it has already reached some rather unlikely locations
Working in business intelligence (BI), my ears always prick up when I hear someone say, “Oh, sure, the BI vendors are saying I’ll be doing [fill in the over-hyped word] soon with BI.” But will they? Today, mobile BI seems to be a hot topic, but will it really become as widespread as people are suggesting?
The Aberdeen Group reported in 2008 that only 17 per cent of companies were delivering BI to mobile phones, despite claiming a strong interest in doing so. There were numerous barriers to entry, including displays being too small, slow network speeds, and poor and inconsistent rendering of HTML.
Throw in the fact that mobile was then evolving at its fastest rate ever, adding complexity and natural interest but not any fevered demand for mobile BI.
The proliferation of smartphones and now tablets has changed the game, all but eliminating those hurdles. Web pages can now be displayed as designed, without re-rendering. 3G and 4G networks now offer faster downloads, and touchscreens have improved. Myriad iPad and iPhone apps have spurred demand for anywhere, anytime access.
In 2010, the Aberdeen Group said that by mid-2011, half of companies will use some form of mobile BI.
It is certainly a trend. The chief executive of one of my customers, Revol Wireless in the US Midwest, runs a very tight ship and is actively involved in all key decisions. He runs the company from his home in the Hawaiian islands. He can now whip out his iPad on the beach, near the volcano, or even on a pineapple field, and continue to track his company’s sales performance.
If he sees something unusual, he is able to drill down into the data and isolate which market, product or location is involved, and take appropriate action, without leaving paradise.
It is true that many of these mobile BI deployments are relatively lightweight, allowing users to view reports and perform analyses, but not supporting report creation or heavy data exploration. Many executives will merely be alerted when data begins to deviate from the norm.
Mobile legacy
Mobile information consumption has been done in an unstructured way, with email and SMS, for years. But there are definitely uses for genuine mobile BI clients, beyond the obvious executive dashboard and field rep applications. In addition, mobile BI typically has a narrower, more specialised focus than most desktop-based BI apps.
More often than not, mobile BI applications comprise alerts, coupled with consumption-focused reports or dashboards. Interactions are fairly limited - perhaps just a bit of sorting and filtering. Mobile users are not doing the same kinds of broad and deep analysis as in the office. However, mobility is becoming a must-have for many BI initiatives, especially where there is a need to disseminate critical, real-time business information to many people.
Increasingly, enterprise groups and tech providers want platforms that can meet the diverse needs of users, such as a browser-based solution for field personnel and a native client app for executives. As underlying technology standards improve - such as HTML5, REST-based APIs and CSS - the ability to deliver more capable native mobile client applications will increase.
Mobile will probably take us places we have not imagined yet. As an industry, we need to give mobile BI builders in both enterprises and software solution companies the flexibility and facilities they need to craft and integrate mobile BI apps that fit their needs.
Some day soon we won’t talk about mobile BI, just BI. After all, we do not refer to mobile email or mobile calendaring - we just expect those applications to be native, consistent companions in our daily routine. That is the mobile BI vision - coming to a pineapple field near you.