Can Your BI Tool Be the FitBit of the Workplace?

Today we track our fitness, sync our calendars and even monitor our financial activities all from one constant accessory: our mobile device. Consumers are embracing technologies like FitBit and Nike Fuel to give them access to mobile analytics that matter to their specific fitness goals. Much like consumers, business analytics users are increasingly demanding the same type of access to mobile business intelligence (BI) technology that is personalized to their role and their overarching business goals.

With a quick glance at your business data, are you confident you know how to improve customer relationships, increase revenue, and maximize operational efficiencies? You need to be. Your competitors likely are. A 30-to-60 second glance at FitBit tells us exactly what’s going on with our fitness progress, including personalized information that allows us to make quick, informed, and better decisions. The question is – why don’t we manage and monitor our business the same way?

Much like how most FitBit users aren’t personal trainers or competitive athletes, mobile BI users aren’t data scientists or analysts. Today’s mobile BI tools must reflect this. Mobile BI must have the same appeal that mobile applications have to consumers. In other words, they absolutely have to be easy to use, personalized, collaborative and of course, supportive of the BYOD movement. These benefits will bring corporate consumers that are in desperate need of simple metrics, a way to vastly change their decision making process.

Turn it On, Know What’s Going On

In today’s hyperconnected world, there are mobile apps to track metrics for just about everything in our daily lives. One thing they all have in common is that they are simple to use. If not, then you’ve probably never heard of them. The same approach must be taken for mobile BI tools and applications to be widely adopted at a business and individual level.

Today a majority of company’s workforces are being ignored when it comes to analytics because existing tools are highly catered to data scientists and skilled analysts. However, do the decision makers in your organization fit this bill? Probably not, but these workers still need an analytics tool to monitor business success that doesn’t discourage or confuse them. Whether they are tracking revenue, expenses, employee sick days, fuel use or brand awareness, they need access to mobile metrics that will allow them to easily monitor the pulse on the health of their organization, department or territory.

In less than 60 seconds, you should be able to pick up your mobile device, open an application and immediately see the key performance metrics that matter most to you. The speed that mobile metrics offers can empower you to take action and get issues resolved as soon as possible. Hundreds of reports and dashboards push information to users every day, but what will make these users ultimately take advantage of the information they are being provided is ease of use (the one thing current mobile BI tools cannot offer).

But how can a company actually do this? It’s easier than you think. The data used to power a mobile BI tool like this already exists in your organization. It’s the operational data and key performance indicators (KPIs) – revenues, sales volumes and items shipped – which are needed to accurately monitor business performance.

Since you already have that data, it’s just a matter of making it available to end users; installation and instituting metrics can happen in just hours. Before lunch, KPI metrics can be predefined and calculated from your existing data sources, and then results delivered and displayed on a mobile device.

But how real-time will this be? It’s as real-time as your existing data. Some companies update their data every 30 seconds – which means their mobile BI tool is as real-time as that. And if you’re worried about data quality, don’t fuss. Since mobile BI leverages your existing databases and queries, data quality was already addressed when your operational reporting was initially configured. The very core of mobile BI is that you can turn it on and know what’s going on, with all the information you need at your fingertips anywhere you are.

Data: One Size Does Not Fit All

Every day we look to data to guide us in making business decisions. Whether it’s how a new hire is performing or how well a new product is being received in the market. Members of the company are heavily invested in seeing the newest numbers. Anyone who has led a numbers update meeting understands there’s no perfect dashboard that will satisfy everyone.

Personal BI is taking off in countless industries such as retail, transportation, government and financial services. There are mobile BI tools available right now that allow business users in all industries to establish thresholds for key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to them and allow them to easily graph performance trends based on these thresholds. The most effective tools are capable of helping any industry or knowledge worker. It’s like turning on CNBC or Bloomberg Financial—within 15 to 30 seconds you know everything you need to know. That is truly an effective BI solution. If your application doesn’t do this, it might be time to rethink or replace what you have.

For example, a sales director with a Northern California territory at a national apparel store doesn’t need to see reports for sales in New York. He also doesn’t have the time to sift through reports, tabs or filters to determine how sales in his region are doing each day. What will help him is a tool that allows him to set sales thresholds for his territory or specific stores, which he can check from his mobile device in less than a minute. This will allow him to easily spot real-time opportunities or problem areas his stores are facing, and institute a plan the moment he sees his metrics go below or above the thresholds he has set.

For mobile metrics to become consumable, users need to have the capability to gain instant access to their most important business metrics through a real-time, user-based tool. At the end of the day, an HR director is not measuring the same KPIs as a city mayor, but both can use metrics to be proactive in addressing their pressing business needs.

Peer-to-Peer Collaboration

There’s no doubt that enterprises are turning social. More and more BI tools are building in social capabilities to foster simple collaboration among users and share insights within a business group or organization. Face-to-face meetings, emails and phone calls are the top mechanisms for collaborating on BI insights now, but imagine the efficiencies that can be introduced when teams can interact with each other on the same screen as a visualization of their current business conditions.

The president of an industrial construction company could, for example, pick up his phone and see a visual depiction of data that shows how current project expenses compare to the allocated budget figures for the company’s biggest project of the year. If the project is over budget, the president can directly pull up that visualization on his mobile device and start a conversation on the same page as the data instead of hounding the project manager to see what’s going on. In many cases, the conversation will have already begun and the president can see comments and interactions that will help him to understand why the budget is reading the way it is, and what’s being done to address budgetary issues with subcontractors and the client.

A key requirement of true mobile BI is to instantaneously socialize insights with colleagues, allowing peer-to-peer collaboration from any mobile device. Socializing business intelligence can help you make immediate, informed decisions about the most critical aspects of your business.

Bring Your Own BI

Our work-from-anywhere-at-any-time culture has made having an enterprise mobile strategy a must. Between work travel, customer meetings, time with family and the occasional vacation, organizations that are embracing the BYOD movement must still be able to allow access to mobile BI tools, no matter what mobile device or operating system is being used.

When BI is made available on any mobile device (either personal or corporate-owned) it can help workers easily monitor their business, while giving them the ability to react faster to events as they happen. In order to help make better business decisions and take immediate action, mobile is crucial when putting metrics into the hands of everyday business users.

Achieve Better Business Visibility

I’ve worked with many companies that have aging information systems for reporting and analyzing data related to customer satisfaction, operations, revenue and more. These aging systems require manual reporting that is only giving these companies visibility into the past, rather than helping them plan for the future.

But mobile BI is changing this. A multi-site dental practice, for example, can use a mobile BI application to easily graph performance trends by setting a threshold for accounts receivable within the application. For instance, by pre-setting a $100,000 monthly threshold for accounts receivable only requires the practice owner to look at a mobile device for 30 seconds to determine whether or not the business is on track to collect patient payments due that month. With mobile BI, the practice owner doesn’t have to wait for a report from operations to know whether maintaining cash flow is in danger.

Having this insight provides management and operations the opportunity for follow-up before the billing cycle comes to an end. True mobile BI offers visibility into a business’s most important metrics and liberates users from a dependence on long, data-intensive reports that are made to be opened on a computer or were only available in a dashboard squished down to fit a mobile device.

Stakeholders, like a dental practice owner, can set and see the thresholds that matter most to their business while lying in bed, traveling from one office to another or while waiting in line to buy lunch. Achieving better visibility into operations is just one of the many immediate ways mobile BI is changing the way businesses operate and making them more efficient than ever thought possible.

Just Remember…

If you want your organization not to miss out on valuable information that can shape decisions, strategy and long-term company goals, consider utilizing BI that’s easy to use, personal, collaborative and most of all – mobile.

About the author: With over 20 years of experience in private and public technology and information system companies, Patrick’s experience brings broad insight to the problems facing evolving companies. His passion is leveraging technology into unique and effective business solutions to maximize a company’s performance and revenue. Now with TIBCO Software, Patrick has built over 25 commercial software solutions that span his entire career. Currently focused on designing, developing and selling services and solutions around business intelligence. http://husting.com/

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