Understanding organization’s business environment and internal capabilities is essential for profitable operating and development of the company, especially on the stage of saturated market. Business Intelligence (BI) tools have became commonly accepted instruments for dealing with analysis of both complex external factors and data and internal business indicators. However BI tools are constantly developing further in order to provide users not only with more reach functionality but also with mobility, flexibility and even “fun” aspects. BI on tablet computers appeared as a response to these most prominent technological challenges.

Understanding your playground

It is very important today understand your playground. Your playground means your business. Business means customers, competitors and markets.

Some background

There are several ways to describe it, but one of the most simple ones and well distinguishing the game is the s-curve. It is basically telling what is happening in the market with the time.

Model can be divided to three phases: pioneering phase, heavy growth and saturation. During these phases the business is totally different and you have to play accordingly.

S-Curve

Pioneering phase means that your product/service is new in the market, maybe even the first one there. The first challenge is to convince customers that product/service is useful. But if you succeed in that, your business will fly because you can define the prices. The second challenge is to form your product/service to be robust and future proof.

Competition starts to build up during the heavy growth phase. More and more players will enter the market and the price competition starts to raise its head. At the moment the situation is still fine, but dark clouds are gathering.

Then comes the real challenge, saturated markets – no organic growth. Now you really need your gaming skills. This situation will very often generate market exits and mergers between competitors. The question is – have you prepared yourself to it?

What this means to the top management?

The crucial issue in the saturated markets is the knowledge. You have to know your customers and their behaviour. You have to know your competitors and especially how they position their offering. You have to know or at least have tools and methods to estimate what is going to happen in the future – how market structure can change, is there any threat of substitutes to your products/services etc.. Of course you can't foresee the future, but from trends you can evaluate what are the possible options.

Data is there in incredible amount.  But it is raw and unprocessed. You need to have tools to process it and the tool is BI-system. Visualization is very important when you are building the full picture.  It is helping us to understand what is the big picture and the target is have it by one view. It is also helping us to understand what are the trends, even to have glimpse to the future. Although it is a view to the history, it will help us to estimate what is going to happen in the future. If we can link  these reports of the specialists, the value of the information will raise dramatically.

Obviously today everything previously mentioned has to be mobile.

BI on tablet computers

Development of BI systems currently is gathering pace. Moreover BI revolution correlates very tightly with general technological trends. Recent research of Gartner revealed interesting  tendencies. Users are willing that their BI systems will be easy, mobile and have “fun” aspect.

Today mobile BI is used only in limited number of organizations. Nevertheless, with appearance on the market of iPad and other tablet computers some moves are evident in this area. Gartner analysts argue that big screen size, touch screen technology and  interactivity are making these devices very useful for BI functions (which are not limited only to viewing of reports). Consequently, the forecasts of experts are evidencing that mobile device owners can easily become BI-users.

On the first glance, tablets can be perceived purely as information visualization tools, but not as serious computational devices. Due to this reason many processes of BI system work is logical to implement on the server side. On the other hand users don't have always Internet connection. Therefore BI for tablets should provide opportunities also to off-line work. According to Digital Design following approach can be successful. The data is uploaded to the server, where it is processed. Next ready local cube is sent to the tablet where manager can consider from different dimensions. In addition to OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) technologies, visualization of tablets of data mining results seems very promising for looking for dependencies and forecasting opportunities. It is evident that whole analysis cycle is not possible to perform on the tablet. However basic functions availability might be useful.

BI-application of RoamBi for iPad

In general this goes in line with common paradigm of BI systems. In majority of cases top-managers do not investigate deep arrays of data. 80% of all conclusions is done by analysts, which are basis to top management doing vision related decisions. Nevertheless some details that are behind analysts’ conclusions might be interesting.
 
According to Digital Design, development of BI for tablets can move towards usage of new communication channels. While working with reports in the office, top managers can quickly get comments from analysts. When of working outside the office the tablet could be used while all required information for it will be stored in network folder. Nevertheless it is not always easy to understand what should be paid attention on. But if graphs will be supplemented with audio comments of analysts the work would become significantly more efficient. Such representation of data is more understandable and effective, because different communication channels are used. Additionally, majority of the people rather speaks than writes which makes audio comments very powerful. And, finally, this solution will provide top-manager with “fun” aspect he is often looking for.

Timo Kangas, K-Advisers Oy

Ekaterina Ignatyeva, Digital Design