Today, people's lives are very much driven by access to information. In fact, business intelligence (BI) has been trying to achieve exactly that over the past 20 years - being able to bring people closer to the information they need in order to make effective daily decisions - not only in the case of business information, which is becoming more and more of a true reality.
Users worldwide have access to a multitude of online Web sites that provide them with information for use in their day-to-day lives. The list is getting longer and longer, and includes aspects such as weather forecasts, show times, bus timetables, stock prices, flight schedules, arrival times, calendars, sports events, sport scores and statistics, among others.
These Web services made a rapid transition from Web sites to mobile applications, which is clearly evident in SA, where Internet usage via mobile devices has grown among urban users from 10% in 2009, to 27% at the end of 2010, according to research conducted by World Wide Worx*.
Intelligence in action
All of these apps show impressive reporting and graphing capabilities.
Cor Winckler is technical director at PBT.
Having said that, I myself make use of practical apps like Windguru to make some of my day-to-day decisions, checking what the weather would be before I decide whether to cycle to work the next day or not. Windguru offers a five-day wind-rain-weather prediction. What is interesting to note is that the Windguru information screen looks very much like a regular business intelligence application front-end, with tabular data, colour-coded to indicate strong wind conditions. On the days that I do decide to cycle to work, I switch on a GPS application, namely MotionX GPS Lite, which can display several, very interesting statistics and graphs about the journey - both during and after the trip. The information about my journey can be published to an online site and analysed at a later stage. There are a wide range of similar sport GPS applications available, and most of them allow for individuals to conduct some form of analysis/trending of personal training data.
So naturally, because I work in the BI industry, I decided to see what is available in Apple's iStore along the lines of displaying my own business data (in a similar manner). I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that not only do some of the mainstream vendors supply mobile versions of their BI applications, but there are also several free front-ends available that can display one's own dashboards and reports, as long as the data is available in a simple format like comma-separated values or Excel.
Within minutes, I was able to see that Business Objects, Microstrategy and Qlikview all have free downloadable front-end apps for iPhone and iPad. I did not have time to locate any others, but I'm sure there most probably are more available. There are also additional third-party apps like Sketch Report Pro that offer access to Microsoft reporting services reports.
What's more, a few of the free apps available that enable visualisation/BI include Roambi Visualiser, Business Indicators, Push BI and Sketch Reports, to name just a few. Most of these were either free, or had a slightly limited free version, with more functionality or connectivity available in the paid-for version.
All of these apps show impressive reporting and graphing capabilities, with the ability to slice, dice and drill down to detail.
App central
Of course, Apple's iStore is not the only source of online mobile applications. Users with Android cellphones have a similar marketplace for mobile applications, with several online sites offering Windows mobile applications, and Nokia's OviStore offering.
From a 'back-end' perspective, all one needs to do in most cases is to publish summarised KPI or dashboard data on a secure Web server. These applications connect to this information over the air either using 3G or WiFi Internet connectivity. The provider of the data can make it as secure as they want, as well as decide on the frequency of publishing the information. This then gives anyone, anywhere with the correct privileges, access to the information that has been published by the back-end.
Ultimately, this would give the mobile employee (whether it is a sales representative, board member, commuter, consultant or just someone stuck in traffic) the power to make on-the-fly decisions based on more than just gut-feel.
In a world where there are more and more pressures for short turnaround time in business, this may just be the edge that sets one business apart from the next.
* Mobility 2011 research project conducted by World Wide Worx and First National Bank.
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