Mobile business intelligence puts data right where it’s needed and the potential benefits of this are huge. Mobile BI provides the ability to make decisions with data, wherever you are and delivers access to data throughout the organization, putting data into the hands of those who really need it.
Mobile business intelligence elevates and extends aspects of traditional business intelligence. Analytics can be accessed and edited from more devices and serve more targeted needs. As modern analytics systems evolve to embrace mobile, take these seven best practices into account for effective mobile BI.
Mobile BI Best Practices
1. Avoid Creating too Many Dashboards
Mobile BI is not just about fitting your dashboards into a mobile device. You need to adapt to the new layout and resolution and not recreate each of your dashboards for every device. The best approach is to use many of the same dashboards both on your mobile and desktop applications, with minor tweaks. This could require extensive effort initially but in the long run you can save yourself a lot of time and effort required to manage multiple dashboards.
2. Adopt Visualization Best Practices
The size of display and resolution of mobile devices is usually lower than a computer and this difference in form factor has a huge impact on how users view and interact with data. You need to know how to utilize space well and learn the rules of creating reports and dashboards in the constrained space offered by mobile devices. Make the objects touch friendly and stick to the most necessary visualizations and dashboard objects as overcrowding the screen will make the dashboard much less usable.
3. Design for Users on the Go
Always assume that your users will be accessing information on the go. Simplify the experience by removing excessive filters and optimizing the interface for touch automatically. You should not have to create a separate version of each dashboard for mobile devices. Also, deliver self-service capabilities and make it easy for users to search for content based on different parameters, so that they can quickly find what they need.
4. Provide Context and Personalization
With the amount of information available to a user continuously increasing, the challenge for organizations is to make this information both contextual and relevant. Your users must be able to quickly gain insights from the numerous dashboards available to them and it’s only possible when you personalize and contextualize their experience. You need standardized data management processes and a robust data governance framework to provide the right information to the right user at the right time.
5. Leverage Social Collaboration
Improve collaboration by making your reports and dashboards easy to create and share both internally and externally. You can allow user comments for better engagement, provide interactive capabilities so that users can walk through reports during a meeting, and offer offline access for people who are on the go.
6. Ensure Data Security
Organizations need to keep their data secure and make sure that their employees’ personal mobile devices comply with the company’s security guidelines. Using a Mobile Device Management tool can securely distribute apps and data to verified users, make sign in easier, install automatic security patches and updates, and also wipe sensitive data if a device is lost. You can also use a Single Sign On (SSO) system to make it easier for users to login securely.
