We live in a world where 61% of smartphone users check their phones within five minutes of waking up in the morning. Realising this change in lifestyle, organizations are adopting concepts similar to Bring Your Own Device or BYOD at workplace to make it easier for employees to accomplish their tasks. In a study by Tech Pro Research in 2013, 44% of respondents said they were allowing BYOD and 18% were planning to implement it within 12 months, while 37% completely forbade it.
Organizations need their employees to be able to access data analysis tools and business intelligence tools on the go for quicker and efficient decision making. They need more functionality rather than just email correspondences and informative alerts pushed to smartphones, which hardly gets any real work done. Mobile BI Apps will bring data analysis and business intelligence tools to employee’s smartphones giving them the power to filter, sort and manage data in real time.
Following are the advantages of Mobile BI App.
Analytics
Applying business intelligence to data involves complex process like data mining, process mining, online analytical processing, data cleansing, business process modelling etc… Performing such composite tasks require time and focus with Mobile BI app users can keep track of such analytics anywhere making probing real-time data easier. With Interactive apps and easy data, sharing organizations can empower their analytics while their employees are still on the go.
Interactivity
Many Apps like Jaspersoft provides mobile SDK enabling users to customize the look, feel and functions of the native applications and integrate analytics with other apps too. Personalised dashboards also help as each user has the power to organize its dashboard according to their requirements and not settle with a generic layout.
Budget
Profits earned from analytics outweigh the cost involved in hiring app developers and developing customized BI apps. With Bring Your Own Device to office concept, organizations practically save money on the infrastructure, add BI to that there is hardly any need to state the obvious.
Response to altering conditions
Whether it is system crash, power out or some change in socio-economic conditions, business doesn’t stop. With local factors having little significance, businesses will runs on the go enabling users to make quicker and effective business decisions.
Decision Making
Mobile BI Apps enable users to keep analytics at their tips, browsing the historical data and drawing conclusions is no more a tedious and time consuming process, since most of the data is pre-processed only important decision making task is left for the user.
Automation
Data that is fed for Business Intelligence is also used by many other less complex processes like tracking and billing etc… once the data processing is automatized; manual work for other process also reduces.
Conclusion
Security issues involved with concepts similar to Bring Your Own Device to office that makes the entire idea of mobile workforce unattractive needs to be resolved. With Technologies like Internet of things shaping our society mobile workforce is already a popular concept, and the rate at which big data is generated ideas of putting BI at IOT device itself is increasingly making more sense.