Mobile Business Intelligence

Quick Summary: Do you know an average person checks his mobile 110 times in a day? Imagine having access to critical business insights and real-time analytics of your users. From improved sales analysis to better decision-making, this technology can transform your enterprise performance. Don’t miss out and read on to learn why mobile BI is essential for your business growth.

It’s funny how we end up being part of a historical shift and not realize it. You can have history being created right in front of you and still be unaware of its gravity. You come to terms with it only after its full culmination.

The last time this happened when business processes started migrating to the online platform. Although we did feel the vibe, back then, we did not imagine the internet to change the way we do business. Granted that we were still exploring the medium but did we expect it to revamp our business landscape entirely?

I don’t think so. However, it did turn out to be a significant phase of our mobile application development.

Now today as business intelligence tools migrate to the mobile platform, we once again find ourselves amidst a metamorphosis like situation. We know this time again, our business landscape is going to change. But right now, it’s hard to envision what it would exactly look like in the future.

Howard Dresner, founder of Dresner Advisory Services, echoed the same sentiment in his Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study in 2011 webcast when he stated – “We are in the midst of a profound shift, a paradigm shift in favor of mobile business intelligence and things will never fundamentally be the same again.”

So what would they look like then? Let’s examine.

What is Mobile Business Intelligence (BI)?

Simply put, Mobile BI is the next evolution of traditional business intelligence. It empowers businesses to access actionable insights from data and analyze it real-time directly on their mobile phones anytime, anywhere to make data-driven decisions and gain a competitive edge in the market.

To successfully navigate through today’s speed-first business world, Mobile BI is one of the must-have weapons in your toolkit. Even studies have predicted that the mobile BI market is projected to grow upto $61.15 billion by 2030.

Mobile Will Be the First Choice of BI Users

Undoubtedly, mobile phones are the first choice of every user. And as stated by a report, 21% of millennials open an app more than 50 times daily. People use mobile apps for every aspect of their life.

For years businesses have depended on PDF reports and interactive dashboards as vehicles of business intelligence. But now mobile apps have reached a point where they can take over the responsibility of delivering business intelligence.

What aides them is their small size combined with their state-of-the-art multi-touch interfaces. Mobile BI software apps make information easy accessible at fingertips, literally! They are also more intuitive as compared to existing full-client BI systems. So don’t be surprised if more and more BI users start reaching out for their iPads instead of laptops or PCs.

Mobile BI Will Touch Enterprise at Grass-Root Level

With almost every single member of an enterprise workforce using a mobile phone, business intelligence will percolate deeper in the enterprise with concept of Enterprise App Development. Employees will have greater access to real-time analytics and business reports breaking the top management’s dominance over BI.

Now even the guys working the floors or on the road for an enterprise will have access to business reports. Thus mobile business intelligence will usher in a new class of users for BI.

A Deluge of BI Applications

Currently, mobile BI vendors are matching the functionalities and autonomy of web-based and desktop-based BI applications through interactive dashboards. With time these applications will get standardized and centralized.

Once this happens, we expect vendors to come up with real cutting-edge BI solutions that will have desktop and web options – but will primarily focus on the mobile platform. The emergence of enterprise mobility will peack its high to enable fast and smart work processs. There will be a torrent of mobile applications with integrated analytics and operations to serve fast emerging agile enterprises.

Better Sales Analysis and Visibility

Sales analysis and predictive analytics have dominated enterprise BI applications for decades. Now with BI available on iPads and tablets, sales managers and decision-makers have ready access to real-time analytics.

They don’t need to go back to months-old reports for better insight. They can better project future market scenarios, manage the supply chain, and optimize performance.

Quick access to critical information

The use of critical information by managers and staff will clearly increase with Mobile Business Intelligence software usage.

Any data or information can be viewed from their devices having internet connections with BI apps on smartphones and tablets. It became clear from a Business Intelligence study among 389 organizations that one of Business Intelligence’s most significant success factors is the use of information for analysis, process improvement, action, and innovation.

New Security Concerns

As with any new platform, mobile also brings along a host of security issues. But with mobile BI applications dealing with sensitive corporate information and business-critical data, these security issues take on a whole new meaning. Here, enterprises will prefer to store data on their servers instead of allowing mobile device storage.

And if the data is highly sensitive and requires to be secured, enterprises may choose to withhold it and not let it pass down to mobile devices.

But not all market participants are under the spell of mobile BI apps. Critics of mobile BI have reared their heads and already declared it as a fad. They argue that mobile BI apps devoid of interactivity are nothing more than just informative emails or more so text messages.

Also, they say that the ease of using such mobile BI apps is subject to the users’ mobile devices. They also point towards the ambiguity of how end-users of mobile BI would be able to interact and collaborate.

The Ending

When evaluating the need for business intelligence in mobile app, the functionality that users need on their devices should first be identified by an organisation. The smaller screen size, data limitations, and touchscreen-based functionality mean that for very data-heavy analytics, a mobile business intelligence applications won't work. Mobile business intelligence software is generally well served by operational end-users, who are often off-site and make decisions based on smaller amounts of data.

Nobody can deny that mobile BI is still in its blossoming stage, with all said and done. We know how it will evolve in the future. It’s like standing at the doors of an unknown but exciting Pandora. You never know what you might encounter there. But it’s definitely worth a try!

We at Radixweb understand how big the future of Mobile BI software is going to be. Hence our skilled professional develops the mobile business intelligence applications that are future ready and scalable.

Talk to us now if you want to build a stupendous mobile business intelligence software to skyrocket your business.