“I want it all, and I want it now!”
The famous line from the song I Want It All from English rock band Queen’s twelfth studio album – The Miracle – encapsulates the current mentality towards Business Intelligence (BI). Gartner’s James Richardson agrees.
"One of the common characteristics of consumerized technologies is better ease-of-use and immediacy," said Richardson.
"BI users want to be able to just pick up and use the technology — they don't want to have to read the manual. This places a high degree of importance on the human/computer interaction aspects of BI product and deployment design.”
The consumerization of BI, and enterprise computing technologies at large, has led to a surge in conversation around the promise of Collaborative BI. Now, the same principles are being applied, and discussed in relation to, the development of applications for the mobile distribution of reporting and analytics.
Richard suggests in a recent Gartner research report – The Consumerization of BI Drives Greater Adoption – that BI vendors are developing more consumer-oriented products to capitalize on the opportunity that traditionally low BI user-adoption rates represent.
"The fact of the matter is that BI is not pervasive and adoption is not in line with the investment made by most firms,” said Richardson.
"Less than 30 percent of the potential users of organizations' standard BI tools use the technology today. "This is often because the tools are too difficult to use, slow to respond or deliver content of limited relevance.
"The consumerization of BI technology offers a means for it to break out and reach many more users, by offering faster, more user-friendly and more relevant BI."
Collaborative Business Intelligence
Collaborative BI – the blending of more standard BI capabilities with Web 2.0 features borrowed from popular social media platforms – has dominated BI product development in 2011.
Collaborative BI, a type of collaborative decision-making (CDM) module, harnesses the intuitive functionality of socially oriented technologies, to encourage interaction around reporting and analytics. The goal is to enable organizations to derive greater value from BI products by significantly expanding its reach within the enterprise. If Collaborative BI can facilitate widespread (and sustained) user-adoption, AKA “BI for the masses”, then significant financial gains can be made by vendor and customer alike.
About Yellowfin Collaborative Business Intelligence
Yellowfin’s unique social and collaborative components allow users to share and discuss business data, not only within the BI tool, but wherever it is needed for decision-making. With Yellowfin, users can:
- Embed BI content anywhere via a simple Javascript call
- Discuss and overlay knowledge on business data via comments and annotations
- Collectively discuss and decide the best course of action through Yellowfin’s discussion forum, using decision widgets for voting and polling
The emerging demand for a more intuitive and interactive approach to BI, which has fuelled the development of Collaborative BI, is now impacting Mobile BI too.
The most successful apps for Mobile BI will exploit the native functionality of new mobile devices and utilize the consumer-oriented features that users are accustom to in social contexts. Exploring mobile analytics should be as easy and familiar as social networking, downloading music, keeping up with the latest news or indulging in a little retail therapy via the most popular and instinctual leisure-time apps.
About Yellowfin Mobile Business Intelligence
Access, interact with, and share business data via the device of your choice, anywhere, anytime. Yellowfin incorporates native applications for the iPhone, iPad and all Android devices and can be delivered to any platform or device via a Web-browser. Experience total device independence with Yellowfin.
Yellowfin will release a new mobile application with enhanced interactivity and functionality by the end of September 2011.
So what?
At first glance, blurring the boundaries between work and play may seem dangerous. But, perhaps somewhat ironically, the potential to actually increase workplace productivity, by incorporating the best practices of social technologies into business processes, is considerable.
Gartner’s James Richardson believes that the consumerization of BI products has the ability to boost user-adoption rates among potential BI users from its current level (28 percent) to 50 percent by 2015.