Back in the Saddle

After taking a couple of days off, I have found that I have a bit of writer’s block. Between responding to the mountain of emails that piled up last week and getting back into the blogging groove, I am a bit stuck. That being said, I came across a couple of articles that I wanted to post some thoughts on.

There seems to be a lot of chatter around mobile BI. I came across 3 separate articles in the last week related to analytics being delivered to mobile devices. The first was an announcement by IBM that they will deliver business solutions through new BlackBerry devices. This includes the Cognos 8 Go software. The second article was from Intelligent Enterprise and had three case examples of businesses that are using mobile devices to deliver BI. The interesting thing I found with this was the simplicity of the applications, which seems critical when dealing with a small interface and only needing specific KPIs. The final announcement is a clinical specific application built by Vaultus Partners and Covisint that delivers patient dashboards to mobile devices.

One trend in all three of these articles is that BlackBerry is the device of choice. Not surprising since RIM has a strangle hold on the enterprise mobile market.

If you read through these and are wondering “How the heck can I be thinking about mobile BI?” when you can’t even get desktop-based reporting, don’t worry. Eventually, you will get to the point where these type of solutions will be possible.