Mobile BI solution: functionality, top 3 tools, benefits, and best practices
August 3, 2023
Today’s business world relies heavily on quick decision-making, so many companies have already adopted BI services and are expanding their capabilities with mobile BI. Let’s explore what purpose mobile BI solutions serve, their key capabilities and top platforms, and what difference they can make for a company.
Mobile business intelligence is a technology-enabled process of extracting meaningful insights from data and delivering them to end-users via mobile devices. Mobile BI users can conduct data analysis in real time using smartphones, tablets, and wearables to make quick data-driven decisions.
Mobile business intelligence market stats
$61.15 bn
is the projected mobile BI market size in 2030
Market Research Future
The US & China
are the two largest mobile BI markets
Research and Markets
Scheme title: Mobile Business Intelligence Market Size
Data source: Mordor Intelligence
Study period
2018 – 2028
Fastest growing market
Asia Pacific
Largest market
North America
Major players
Common features of mobile BI solutions
Data delivery
- Scheduled (time-based, event-based, etc.) data delivery for different types of users via mobile-optimized reports and dashboards, alerts, notifications, and emails
- Instant personalized notifications and alerts on important changes to key performance indicators, anomalies, or goal achievement
- Interaction with reports and dashboards via intuitive gestures (drilling down and up, sorting, filtering, zooming in and out, data hiding)
- Self-service report creation with drag-and-drop functionality, filters, or NLP
- Rich data visualization capabilities, including charts, pivot tables, KPI widgets, summary/tabular views, and dashboards
- Storytelling capabilities
- Content search
Collaboration
- Report distribution to groups or individual users on a schedule or based on business-defined rules
- Messages and comments customization according to the recipient’s user role
- Content (tiles, reports, or visuals) commenting, annotation, and sharing
- Interaction with data through discussions, commenting, or clapping
- Automated notifications about new posts, questions, comments, or replies via push notifications or emails
- BI content embedding (portals, intranets, blogs, web applications, and websites)
Native device functionality
- Access to BI content from different devices
- Offline mode (proactive automated caching and offline editing)
- Uploading files from a mobile device, including audio, videos, QR-codes, or barcodes
- Mobile touch control
- Real-time push notifications and alerts to the home screen about a particular analytics pattern or trend
- GPS integration
Analytics
- Data analysis from different points of view with drill-down, drill-through, and slice-and-dice capabilities
- Predictive modeling for foreseeing business scenarios and patterns
- What-if analysis for simulating complex scenarios and finding optimal business outcomes
- Geospatial analytics
- Augmented analytics
- Real-time data analytics
Data preparation and management
- Pre-built data source connectors to heterogeneous sources, including databases, business applications, flat files, Excel files, feeds, and web URLs
- Universal APIs for building custom integrations to get data from any cloud or on-premises system
- Data transformation and quality management (validation, cleansing, deduplication, enrichment) enabled by ETL/ELT processes
Data storage
- Storing business data in a relational, columnar, and multi-dimensional format
- Consolidating company-wide data in an enterprise data warehouse
- Housing business line-specific data in data marts for particular user groups
- Pre-built integrations with a data lake
- Accompanying analytics data stores with an operational data store for operational and high-volume business data analysis and reporting
- Housing metadata in data catalogs, business glossaries, dictionaries, etc.
Data governance and security
- Multi-factor authentication (user passwords, device ID, biometrics)
- Data encryption in transit and at rest
- Ability to prohibit particular data from downloading
- Fine-grained access control with specific options (read-only, read-write, report authoring, drill-down, or export)
- Data encryption and data masking
- Sensitive data labeling
- User activity and access log
Make quick on-the-go business decisions with mobile BI
Mobile BI access methods
Here are three common ways for end-users to access business intelligence capabilities via portable devices:
Definition
BI applications accessible via a web browser. Users don’t have to download and install web-based mobile BI software and only need an internet connection and a browser to access it. These solutions are also device-agnostic and can be accessed via any device regardless of hardware and software specifics.
Differentiators
Easier and quicker to build and maintain
A single app for all platforms
Cheaper than native and hybrid mobile BI apps
Limitations
Needs a browser and internet connection
Cannot access mobile device features
Inconsistent user experience due to dependency on browsersÂ
Slower than native apps
Native mobile BI applications
Definition
Applications developed for a particular device and operating system that require installation on a user’s smartphone or tablet. Native applications can work offline and deliver superior customer experience due to supporting hardware-specific functionality (touch gestures, geolocation, camera, microphone, etc.).
Differentiators
Fast and interactive
Tailored to a specific platform
Distributed through app stores
Interacts with the device’s utilities
Limitations
Requires heavy financial investment
Expensive to build
Maintenance is the responsibility of a user
Hybrid mobile BI applications
Definition
HTML5 browser-based applications offering some native app functionalities, such as push notifications, offline work with automatically pre-cached content, zooming and double-tap features, calendars, notifications, and more.
Differentiators
Easier, faster, and cheaper to build compared to native apps
User experience on par with native appsÂ
A single app for all platforms
Access to the device’s utilities
Limitations
Slower and less interactive compared to native apps
More expensive than web-based apps
Mobile BI benefits
The highest value of business intelligence is the support of data-driven decisions. Mobile BI capabilities, in turn, can bring the same benefits and beyond, such as: Â
Improved efficiency of work
Mobile BI users can instantly access specific information to make timely decisions and accomplish their daily tasks on time even if they are away from their computers.
Enhanced user experience
Mobile devices are easy to carry around and do not limit users to a particular location, which makes mobile BI a very user-friendly option. Native device functionality also enables a truly interactive user experience.
Improved collaboration
Mobile BI features encourage end-users to collaborate and brainstorm new ideas, such as new content, instant notifications and alerts, comments and reactions, secure content sharing, in-app discussions, and user activity tracking.
Increased data democratization
Mobile BI allows more employees to access data and analytics capabilities to handle information properly and maximize its value. In the long run, increased BI adoption rates accelerate digital transformation and help the company stay competitive.
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Mobile BI challenges
Mobile devices can be lost or stolen, exposing sensitive business data.
Data security risks
Mobile devices can be lost or stolen, exposing sensitive business data.
Data security risks
When a device is stolen or lost, the IT department should be able to block the owner's access to all corporate accounts and sensitive data. Companies adopting mobile BI also need to redefine all existing data security practices and policies. Some other features that could help safeguard data are:
- Screen capture blocking
- Clipboard access control
- Configurable data caching
- Detection of jailbroken devices
If a mobile app’s interface isn’t intuitive and easy to use, negative user experience can lead to employee resistance and sabotage.
Poor user interface design
If a mobile app’s interface isn’t intuitive and easy to use, negative user experience can lead to employee resistance and sabotage.
Poor user interface design
It’s crucial for mobile BI providers to keep user experience consistent, because modern users are accustomed to the polished interfaces of consumer mobile apps and expect the same experience in a mobile BI solution. The following recommendation can help deliver the expected user experience:
- Make user interface self-explanatory (e.g. an app can provide explanations and hints to help users with a certain task)
- Employ functionality common in native apps and familiar to most users, like swiping, pinching, or double-tapping
- Enable users to collaborate with colleagues and customers via email, internal platforms, or social media
- Monitor use adoption, including the most and least used features and user behavior patterns
Lacking value for target users, mobile BI can eventually become just a tool for reconfiguring desktop reports and dashboards for handheld devices.
Failing to cater to unique user needs
Lacking value for target users, mobile BI can eventually become just a tool for reconfiguring desktop reports and dashboards for handheld devices.
Failing to cater to unique user needs
Start with examining the needs of workers predominantly using mobile devices and PCs and creating the functionality most needed by each user group. For example, your employees can prefer to input text with a physical keyboard, run complex analysis on big screens, and switch between windows with a mouse, but use their mobile devices to upload video and audio files. This analysis will lay the groundwork for your mobile BI strategy and change management planning.
Decision-making from anywhere with mobile BI
Mobile business intelligence is among the most prospective trends in data analytics. With mobile computing so mature and affordable, mobile BI will evolve at an even more accelerated pace. With proper preparation and an experienced BI partner like Itransition, you can build a truly-effective mobile business intelligence solution.Â
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