Wayne Eckerson has written a nice guide about mobile BI. See: http://bit.ly/pQq6yM
- Is mobile BI right for your company?
- Which mobile BI device is right for your company?
- What types of employees, tasks and tools are suited for mobile BI programs.
- Evaluate which mobile BI architecture is a fit for your organization.
- Determine which mobile device types your organization should support.
- Role of mobile data management software.
- Architecting for mobile BI.
Summary
Deploying mobile BI in a fast-changing, heterogeneous mobile device market is challenging. The first step is to acknowledge that you will have to support multiple mobile operating systems and run your BI applications on employee-owned devices. The second is to invest in MDM software to manage the distribution, management, security and troubleshooting of those devices and your BI application.
It’s likely that the future of mobile BI is some form of distributed computing that leverages processing power
on the mobile device and remote servers. To compete effectively in the marketplace, mobile BI vendors are
quickly embracing hybrid architectures to deliver the best of localized and centralized computing with few of the
downsides. But we are still in the early stages in the evolution of mobile BI architectures. Hybrid technology is still
maturing and not broadly deployed across all mobile operating systems and devices. So, it behooves your BI
team to carefully evaluate a proposed mobile BI offering and understand its underlying architecture and roadmap
for development.
Your vendor’s architectural choice will have a significant ramification on the level of user adoption for the new mobile BI applications and the amount of internal resources you need to allocate to the effort.