Forrester Blogs › Business Technology › Application Development & Delivery Professionals › Boris Evelson

Not All Mobile BI Applications Are Created Equal

Posted by Boris Evelson on November 24, 2009

Boris Evelson By Boris Evelson

I get many questions about the usage, pervasiveness, and adaption of mobile BI applications. What's a mobile BI application? Beyond a simple delivery of alerts, URLs, or actual reports via email - functionality that has existed for years - here are a few newer approaches to deliver BI on a mobile device:

  1. The no brainer. In theory any mobile device equipped with a browser can access web based, thin client, HTML only BI applications. Yes, these BI apps will be mostly static, not interactive reports and dashboards. Navigation (scrolling, zooming, etc) will be quite awkward. But, this approach indeed requires no additional effort to deploy.
  2. Customization. The next step up is to render each (or all) reports and dashboards to a format suitable to any mobile device in terms of screen size, usage of screen real estate, and mobile device specific navigation instrumentation. A variation of this approach is to create device specific navigation controls (thumb wheel or thumb button for Blackberries, up/down/left/right arrows for Palms, gestural manipulation for iPhone, etc). This obviously requires more development effort, but still no additional software.
Read more

Categories:

What Makes BI SaaS Architecture Multitenant?

Posted by Boris Evelson on November 15, 2009

Boris Evelson By Boris Evelson

I'd like to drill into some more details on my BI SaaS blog from September 2009. A key critical point to "what differentiates one BI SaaS vendor from another" discussion is what really constitutes multi-tenant architecture. Here are some initiall thoughts to stimulate the discussion:

  • DBMS. There's got to be back end, DBMS architecture that allows for one of the following:
    • Automatically generate a separate DBMS instance for each client  
    • Use same DBMS instance for multiple clients, but automatically generate a set of unique tables for each client  
    • Use same DBMS instance and tables for multiple clients, but automatically assign unique keys to to each client so that they can only update and retrieve their own rows  
  • Application. Similar functionality has to exist in the application tier:
    • Automatically connect to the appropriate, client specific DBMS instance, or 
    • Automatically use views that only point to client specific tables, or
    • Append "where" clause to each SQL statement to only retrieve client specific rows  
Read more

Categories:

How To Differentiate Advanced Data Visualisation Solutions

Posted by Boris Evelson on November 11, 2009

Boris Evelson By Boris Evelson

I get many inquiries from clients on how to select a data visualization vendor / solution. The criteria that my clients often site are

  • Thick and thin client
  • Dynamic visualizations, not just static charts 
  • Ability to pull data from multiple sources
  • OLAP-like functionality
Read more

Categories:

Ten Strong Hints Your Enterprise May Not Have A BI Strategy

Posted by Boris Evelson on November 6, 2009

  • 298 Recommendations

Boris Evelson By Boris Evelson

You know that you don't have an enterprise BI strategy if:

 

Want more hints and best practices? Take our BI maturity self assessment test. Then if you actually want to compare your BI strategy and BI maturity against other Forrester clients, take our BI maturity survey. Good luck!

  1. Your end users keep pointing to IT as the source of most BI problems

  2. Your business executives view BI as another cost center
  3. IT staff keep asking end users for report requirements
  4. Your BI is supported by IT help desk
  5. You can’t tell the difference between BI and Performance Management
  6. You can’t measure your BI usage
  7. You can’t measure your BI ROI
  8. You think your BI strategy is the same as your DW strategy
  9. You don’t have a plan to develop, hire, retain and grow BI staff
  10. (My personal favorite) You actually don’t know if your enterprise has a BI strategy!

    Categories: