Do You Have a BI Strategy for Smart Phones?

There are already many mobile users in your enterprise, and their numbers are only going to increase as mobile technologies continue to improve. With that in mind, you might conclude you need to develop a Business Intelligence strategy for mobile devices. However, with Information Builders technology, you don't really need to.

Devices are becoming faster and their screens are becoming more useful despite the small form factor. If you can watch movies, read news and do Google searches from your smart phone or PDA, why not use it also for work? Already, many mobile users receive files and documents on their phones. They also review documents, and make and communicate decisions directly from mobile devices.

These users view the devices as extensions of their laptops that make them available 24/7 anywhere, if their jobs so require. Providing mobile BI is the natural next step to help make mobile users more productive.

Yet, it appears that providing BI content and information access from the mobile devices is not that simple. There are many different devices with different operating systems and different screen sizes that make the choice of a mobile solution nearly impossible. One can either support only a limited number of devices or incur significant maintenance costs for servers and client-specific application versions for each supported device.

WebFOCUS 7.6.1. provides a simple solution that allows for mobile BI by delivering reports to an unlimited number of users. Furthermore, it does not require you to have a mobile BI strategy at all. If you have Active Reports, you can immediately deliver BI content to any mobile device that has the Opera Mobile Internet browser.

By sending an Active Report to the mobile device, you will deliver not only static metrics, but also the ability users to slice and dice the data, and perform analysis on their phone browser without having to install any additional software.

Let me explain how our approach differs from other vendor approaches.

To accommodate different operating systems and device settings, vendors require installation of custom software on the mobile devices, deployment of specialized distribution servers to manage the communications between devices and report repositories, and special templates and rules for developing mobile content in order to ensure that reports render correctly on mobile screens.

Such requirements impose development, mainte-nance, and distribution constraints. Furthermore, frequent changes in mobile technologies make any custom solution unstable and prone to continuous updates or obsolescence. Manage-ment tools simplify, to an extent, but do not eliminate the problem. Therefore, enterprises tend to limit the number of supported devices and/or the number of user applications.

Unlike other mobile BI solutions, Active Reports eliminate the need for specialized technologies to provide access to BI content. Active Reports are architected utilizing standard interactive Web technologies. Thus, they leverage the browser to perform both the rendering of the content and the user interactions with the data in the report. This architecture allows you to deliver the same Active Report either to laptops/ desktops or to mobile devices, as well as it allows users to redistribute content (send and forward) to any users regardless of their device.

Our mobile strategy leverages the mobile browser in the same way as we leverage the laptop browser to deliver payload of information which users can then manipulate either in connected or in disconnected mode. Vendors who have chosen alternative approaches maintain that not all mobile browsers support basic Web interactivity, which drives the need for device specific technologies.

However, since users demand to be able to check their Google e-mail accounts and to schedule flights on Expedia from their mobile devices, the mobile and desktop browsers are beginning to converge to a unified user experience. Strong user demand for mobile web browsing, intense market competition and fast user migration to more robust devices have contributed to a browser war in the mobile arena much like the Internet Explorer vs. Netscape feud. The Opera Browser is the first to support full Web interactivity, but all major vendors have announced upgrades to their browsers.

Finally, Active Reports work with Information Builders' Two-Way-Email product, which allows users to request specific reports directly from their e-mail client on the mobile device. Two-Way-Email makes such requests easy, as it only requires a user to reply to an e-mail. The e-mail reply intelligently passes the request and the user credentials through the enterprise firewall, eliminating the need to install custom mobile application for users to log into and navigate their enterprise repositories.

The requested report is returned in the form of an e-mail attachment that can be opened in the Opera Mobile browser. The combination of push/ pull approaches guarantees that users have access to the entire content of the BI report repository.