Business Intelligence on Mobile
Businesses around the world have been facing a challenge of making right decision throughout the course of modern history. With time, need to make accurate decisions has become more dependent on availability of processed data. Digital age has gifted us with volumes of raw data and nightmare of getting actionable information out of it. Technological evolution of Teradata has enabled the world to process these volume of data and store it in a way that can be used to derive useful information for timely decisions. With this technology corporate are using information as an asset that is leading to higher profits. Decision makers have now started to expect availability of actionable information on the fly, hence, analytics are moving from desktop to mobile devices.
Need for Mobile BI:
Most of the companies so far have not focused on extending BI access to tactical work force. Most of the DWH and BI models are deployed keeping in mind analysts and middle level management. Nevertheless, need is being realized and in many industries analytical information is provided to front-line workers. For this work-force, access on mobile maybe critical. Let us take some real-life examples to understand this:
Retail: Large super stores have many point of sales. These POSes have cash drawers where cash is pilling up. Collecting this cash on regular intervals is usually important to avoid frauds etc. In this scenario, collection agents are on the move continuously and cannot sit on the computer to check desktop reports. A mobile based BI solution is required in this situation to optimize the collection of cash process as well as allow agents to monitor and act wisely.
Telecom: Where brains of the business and operation do not interact with customer directly that often, are required to set high level organisational objectives, which then are executed by front-line workers including call center, sales point/franchises and service centers. To effectively achieve set targets, it is important to delegate operational level decision making to front-line workers. For example, in call centers agents are always focused to sell additional services to existing customers. This effort can be made more effective by providing processed data (generated through BI) regarding a customer when he calls. Call center agent will be able to understand the customer interest and can offer services which customer will be more interested in.
Similarly, sales manager can monitor city-wise and area-wise sales statistics. Manager can take appropriate actions to meet daily sales target by monitoring sales data and can avoid target-miss. It becomes a pro-active approach to meet targets. Conventionally, reason of a daily target-miss would have been analysed the other day.
Technological Advancements:
Many Business Intelligence platforms are providing applications that can deliver graphs and dashboards on mobile devices. These tools use power of teradata to execute complex queries and store pre-aggregated data which then is used to generate visualizations (graphs, dashboards). Specially after Teradata introduced AEI (Active Enterprise Intelligence), theoretical pervasive BI architecture has now become a reality.
SAP Business Objects:
From the early days of Business Objects, they had something called Business Objects Mobile. It has two parts. First one is a component that needs to be installed on the server and the second one is a Java App which is installed on mobile devices. Same application has continued in later versions of SAP BO.
Installation: Once server component is deployed, mobile app can be downloaded over the air (OTA) using WiFi or Mobile Internet by accessing a URL. OTA installer is deployed with war file for Mobile.
Supported Devices: Following devices are supported by BO Mobile App.
- Blackberry OS v4.1, v4.2, v4.3, v4.5 and v4.6
- Symbian Series-60 3rd Edition
- Windows Mobile v5.0 with .Net Compact Framework v2.0 or above
- Windows Mobile v6.0 and v6.1
When installing, client app automatically detects type of mobile device.
SAP Business Objects Mobile and Business Objects Explorer can be used to deliver dashboards and reports on almost all mobile devices including iPhone and Android.
MicroStrategy:
MSTR desktop provides very flashy dashboards but they have introduced mobile component which can be used to deliver dashboards on mobiles phone.
Considerations:
- Number of decision makers using data from Teradata
- Number of managers
- Number of business areas covered
- Monitoring requirements
- Number of operational reports and tactical decision makers
- Competition in the market
- Realization of Business Intelligence as a competitive advantage
- Requirement for real-time data insights
- Focus on process optimization (operational or business)