InetSoft Webinar: Tablets, Not Smart Phones Are Pushing Mobile BI

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Mobile BI: iPads & Tablets" The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Tablets, not smart phones, are becoming the primary deployment platform for business intelligence at many organizations due to their ease of use, their popularity among the executive set and the perceived boost that they give to productivity of the on-the-go workers.

Thanks to tablet PCs, you’re not restricted to hauling a laptop to meetings, you can simply slide out your lightweight tablet, take notes via touch-screen technology, zoom in and out of graphs to focus on more information.

Business users are already starting to get value from these devices. They have changed the way they work. This appears to be a fundamental paradigm shift. Tablet devices can turn the typical IT data request from “get me the information” to “I will get the information myself as long as I can get to it from my tablet.” And the more people in the organization that are getting their own information, the more they use the information for decision making.

Change the Way BI Users Consume

This behavior will evolve in the organization as users become accustomed to the data they have and how they use it. Answering one question with interactive data often leads to users thinking of another question they want to ask. With the right self-service tools, they just navigate to that information. This is the complete opposite of the traditional BI landscape, where people provided management with printed reports or even the static online reports.

Tablets change the way users consume their information. They make it so easy to consume that information for many users who were reluctant to use BI before and we will start using this now with a tablet. Business Intelligence has been moving these days into the higher levels of companies, and nothing is more useful to them than the latest dashboards and graphs showing the top key performance indicators that they are responsible for. And being able to drill down and get further inside into why some KPIs under-performed or over-performed.

Tablets are the perfect forms factors for this kind of use, and they will only accelerate the adoption of BI in an enterprise. The CIOs or COOs and top level managers in organizations are usually the earliest adopters of tablet computers. Although many of them have tried using business intelligence dashboards and applications on smart phones, the form factor may have been too small for anything meaningful to be done beyond the first level of a dashboard or graph. However, the bigger screens provided by tablet computers will change the game for mobile BI in rapid order. It will allow more real estate to interact with the data for slicing and dicing, etc.

So those CIOs and COOs and executives, although they love their tablets, and they only need to get access to the corporate data and the ability to quickly navigate through dashboards and reports to make decisions on the fly or collaborate with their teams on solving issues that are illustrated in the report.

According to a CIO Magazine survey, when making mobile purchase decisions IT leaders are listing ease-of-use first when making mobile purchase decisions, followed by support, services, reliability and security. For many people having a larger screen with touch capability is easier to use than a tiny smart phone screen or BlackBerry trackball. So there is one advantage right there. Zooming in and out of the BI dashboard on an LED-backlit screen blows your smart phone screen out of the water.

Tablets offer important capabilities for road warriors due to their bigger screen, touch keyboards, which are more and more convenient, and also many other features that make the usage of tablets much better than using a laptop on one side or a mobile phone on the other side. The ability of two people to look at the same data on the same device and work together on the touch screen drilling down for details and for insights enhance the collaboration in meetings whether they are onsite, offsite or on the road.