The concept of the “mobile” worker is nothing new. For decades, sales and service professionals have rarely visited their home bases, and instead devoted the bulk of their time to traveling from one customer site to another. Additionally, many executives, senior managers, and line of business supervisors are required to spend significant amounts of time on the road and away from the office.
But, regardless of their role, each one of these workers needs to have anytime, anywhere access to the same kinds of up-to-date, mission-critical business information as on-site employees. Without it, they will be completely disconnected from core business activities and operations – rendering them unable to identify and leverage vital trends and opportunities, or discover and correct problems and issues in a timely fashion when they are away from headquarters.
That’s where mobile business intelligence comes in.
This type of technology, although innovative and cutting-edge, has existed for quite some time. As the use of mobile devices became well entrenched in day-to-day work activities, many of the leading tools on the market began enhancing their offerings accordingly by incorporating the ability to distribute reports to cell phones, pagers, and handheld devices (such as Blackberrys, Palm Pilots, and Windows Pocket PCs) on a scheduled or event-driven basis. These features, although a major step in the right direction, solved only a portion of the problem, since off-site staffers had access to only a fraction of the business intelligence functionality they needed.
But, in the past few years, mobile business intelligence solutions have evolved tremendously to give “on the go” employees greater control over how their reporting and analysis needs are satisfied. Ad hoc queries, monitoring of KPIs and performance metrics, real-time alerts, and even dashboard-style information delivery are now all possible with the implementation and use of advanced mobile BI applications.
If your company maintains a large base of remote employees, or staff members that are frequently away from the office, then mobile BI solutions should be on the top of your priority list. In fact, an Information Week survey shows that while just 13 percent of companies currently have the technology in place to send BI data to mobile devices, more than one-third plan to implement that capability within the next two years.
But, not all mobile BI applications are created equal. When evaluating vendors, be sure to look for the following features and functionality:
- A simple and intuitive interface that is similar to the client/server or Web-based version of the solution.
- Maximum flexibility, so mobile users can access, run, and interact with reports in any way needed.
- Access to real-time corporate data – not just “canned” or pre-run reports.
- The ability to work seamlessly with virtually any commonly-used handheld device.
- Advanced security, to keep confidential corporate information – such as data contained in financial reports – secure from unauthorized access.
