Top 5 Myths About Mobile BI that Enterprises Need to Watch

In the last post we were discussing about Business Intelligence of leading-edge organizations goes mobile and how mobile BI helps the businesses and today we will discuss about “Mobile BI Myths” in this article.

Mobile dashboards and BI are among the hottest topics in the industry and justifiably so: mobile access to data is a critical tool for decision making.

Today we will examine the five common myths associated with mobile business intelligence and uncover the facts about cost, implementation, and capabilities. We will also explain why companies should move forward with their mobile business intelligence projects.

#1 Same Mobile BI to All Users

Mid-sized and larger companies would find themselves hard pressed to move their entire mobile workforce onto the same device – making the successful widespread use of mobile BI nearly impossible.

In the past, most of the companies originally deployed their BI applications on Blackberry devices because they were it was most popular among business users and provided the easiest way of accessing corporate information. That has changed with the introduction of the iPhone, Android-based devices and the iPad, mobile users expressed a preference for iPhones and Android-based phones. In addition, web browsers have become device-independent, allowing them to deliver BI content to almost any device.

#2 Each Mobile Device required a Native Application

Most business intelligence tools on the market these days lack the ability to exploit each device’s native capabilities, therefore require companies to build custom reporting and analysis applications for each type of device in use.

With thousands on mobile users of different versions of difference mobile devices will be using mobile BI in an enterprise. With the wrong mobile BI platform in place could be an obstacle that IT simply cannot overcome.

There are a few rare, advanced solutions designed to eliminate the time and effort associated with creating and maintaining multiple versions of various BI assets for each mobile platform.

#3 Mobile BI is only consumed on mobile phones and smartphones.

Few years ago when the majority of mobile BI consumers used BlackBerry and Palm devices, then came iPhone, Android based phones. Devices such as the iPad eliminate the shortcomings of iPhones (mostly related to small screen size) and are actually driving the trend toward large-scale BI adoption for obtaining a high-level view of business operations,.

#4 Mobile Users Are Always Connected

Many mobile BI solution vendors aren’t including features that allow users to perform reporting and analysis when disconnected. There are times when Internet connections – particularly Wi-Fi – may be rather slow. This can frustrate users, forcing them to disconnect from the web, but they may still need to gather important intelligence on their way to a meeting or a customer visit.

It’s important to make sure that capability is included in a mobile BI platform and empowering them to work in disconnected mode.

#5 Mobile BI users can’t perform ad hoc or deep analysis.

Many companies shy away from mobile business intelligence because their users need the ability to interact extensively with data from their smartphones and tablets. Some of the more advanced platforms can deliver advanced reporting and analysis tools without the need for specialized software by leveraging the native capabilities of any mobile browser “to empower mobile workers with analytic functionality that can be applied to virtually any data from any enterprise source.”

In spite of the abounding myths, mobile business intelligence doesn’t have to be expensive, hard to implement, or difficult to use. In fact, companies that chooses the right solution, with the right capabilities, will realize low TCO and rapid ROI, while empowering their mobile users with the ability to access and interact with timely, complete corporate information from any smartphone or tablet.