Today’s office no longer looks like a block surrounded by four walls with a desk in the middle. Rather, today’s workers, at all levels, want to be mobile and this requires mobile applications as well. They need to be able to access analytical data whether they are in the physical office or not. This is why specialists like Abhishek Gattani have to come up with solutions for mobile business intelligence (BI). In so doing, they play a pivotal role in ensuring companies can make real time, educated decisions based on data streams that come from different sources.
The Mobile BI Market
There has been significant growth in the mobile BI market, but it continues to be a very small niche in overall business intelligence and analytics. The result is that there have only been inconsistent solutions and they are slow to develop. However, since remote and wireless devices can now access faster web services, and since mobile devices are a lot more powerful, their cost has been reduced. Accessibility and speed were the greatest barriers to appropriate mobile BI, and those two have now been removed. The result is that the niche is finally starting to widen.
For developers who want to create mobile BI applications, two main options exist:
- Native apps dedicated specifically to the business. This is an attractive solution if only one mobile platform is used, and user experience is at the heart of what is created. This is particularly good for Windows devices. However, most companies now have “bring your own” policies for their mobile devices, which means apps have to be functional across all operating systems.
- Creating apps that use different languages and methods so that they can be used on different operating systems. These do have to have individual attributes, which create both advantages and disadvantages, varying on how they will be used.
Both of the two options have their own pros and cons, but businesses do have to choose at least one of them. This is because there is an increasingly big role for mobile decision making, and businesses have to keep up if they are to remain relevant.
Business intelligence across mobile applications is becoming increasingly popular. Yet, it is still in its infancy. However, as with all things technology, it is likely that it will soon start to snowball until it is commonplace across the board. Since it is clear that mobile devices are here to stay, and that more people are interested in remote working – and that this is in fact necessary to be able to make an impact on the global world of commerce – it can be said that mobile BI applications will soon be readily available.
For professionals like Abhishek Gattani, this is challenging, but also very exciting. It offers a new method of acquiring data for business analysis and intelligence, leading to new and important insights. Being at the forefront of the development of applications to make this more user-friendly has enabled him to play a pivotal role in various innovative projects.
