Whether you are an IT pro, a business owner or business manager, you probably like to stay up to date on industry developments, and on the newest technology. That is a wise choice, because these advancements can often provide leverage for you to enhance products and/or services, and create competitive advantage.
Mobile Business Intelligence (or Mobile BI) is defined as ‘a system comprising both technical and organizational elements that present historical and/or real-time information to its users for analysis on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets (not laptops), to enable effective decision-making and management support, for the overall purpose of increasing firm performance.’
Aberdeen Group reports that businesses adopt Mobile BI to:
‘Mobile BI benefits go well beyond simple reporting and the sharing of data across user groups, to address real business issues and to keep users up to date and allow them to respond to real world, real-time issues.’
As local and global competition increases, most businesses are looking for ways to improve their competitive advantage, and to quickly adapt to the changing market, to employee needs and to customer buying behavior.
It can be helpful to consider some real-world business use cases, in order to understand the value and benefit of incorporating a Mobile BI solution within your technology landscape and your analytics approach.
The advantages of Mobile BI go beyond team collaboration and individual reporting needs, to provide the background and foundational information needed to make decisions on business strategy and to understand customer preferences.
The following list of companies represents a small sampling of businesses currently using Mobile BI to improve business results and efficiency:
Amazon – Amazon analyzes purchasing behavior and browsing history to predict what products a customer might want to see, and what they are likely to buy, personalizing the customer experience and making it easier for customers to complete a transaction. BI tools help the business to forecast demand and ensure that stock is available.
Starbucks – The business has implemented a loyalty program to help with customer engagement and sales, personalizing marketing strategies and allowing customers to order, pay and receive rewards. It gathers data using its digital channels and uses that data to create targeted offers and to improve customer retention, as well as increasing the amount customers spend during a visit.
Netflix – The company uses BI tools to personalize the viewing experience and to analyze customer viewing preferences and push specific options to the customer based on viewing history. Mobile BI tools allow teams to analyze and share information regarding regional viewing and to make decisions on the fly.
Uber – The company business model is dependent on the rapid changes and shifting behavior of customers from one local and regional area to the next. Real-time pricing and operational decisions are made to support surge pricing and driver deployment for high demand areas. The back-end systems and BI tools allow drivers to access information using the Uber app so that they can quickly respond to the changing environment.
Tesla – Mobile BI and wireless car data analytics allow Tesla to connect remotely to corporate offices and collect and analyze vehicle data to address issues and update customers on maintenance etc.
X/Twitter – Mobile BI provides support or moderators to identify and quickly address platform safety issues, violations, etc. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with BI tools allows the business to quickly respond and ensure a safe user experience.
Mobile BI provides the background and foundational information needed to make decisions on business strategy and to understand customer preferences.
These examples illustrate the many ways in which Mobile BI can be used to address business issues, providing user access and analytics for team members no matter where they are and how they need to use the data. Mobile BI benefits go well beyond simple reporting and the sharing of data across user groups, to address real business issues and to keep users up to date and allow them to respond to real world, real-time issues.
If you want to support your business user team and provide a foundation for BI tools that will better serve your team and your customers, explore Smarten Mobile BI benefits and features, with powerful functionality and access for your business users including out-of-the-box Mobile BI and advanced analytics for every team member. For more information on Mobile BI and Augmented Analytics, read our article, ‘Understanding The Truth About Mobile BI.’
Original Post : Understanding How Businesses Use Mobile BI to Achieve Results!
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What is Key Influencer Analytics ? Simply put, Key Influencer Analytics is an analytical technique that helps the user analyze and understand the various factors affecting an outcome, what variables impact the metric, and the ranking of those factors. Key Influencer Analytics takes the guesswork out of decisions by clearly illustrating what factors influence success of a pricing strategy, a business location choice, a marketing campaign, a research project, etc.
‘With the right analytics solution, your users can simply point to the dataset they want to analyze and Key Influencer Analytics will identify the target and the influencers or predictors that will affect the target, along with its impact.’
Grand View Research estimates the analytics software market at nearly 142B USD, with an expected growth of nearly 14% over the next five to six years. The reason for this growth is simple. In order to succeed in their market of choice, businesses must understand the competition, the customer and how their products and services are perceived and embraced in the market, so they can plan for the future and adapt to changes.
There are a few factors that will impact the efficiency and effectiveness of the analytics solution you choose.
Here are just a few of the benefits of Key Influencer Analytics:
‘Key Influencer Analytics takes the guesswork out of decisions by clearly illustrating what factors influence success of a pricing strategy, a business location choice, a marketing campaign, a research project, etc.’
With Key Influencer Analytics your team can address the right issues and capitalize on opportunities to optimize results. Explore Smarten Augmented Analytics modules and components and the benefits of Key Influencer Analytics for your team and your enterprise.
Original Post : Use Key Influencer Analytics to Understand Data Relationships!
You have a really great business idea for a software product and you want to develop the concept. Perhaps it is a business application you want to sell to other businesses, or it might be a consumer software product or web application. Whatever the case, your business will want to proceed carefully. There are many developers, programmers and IT consulting partners who offer custom software application development services, and mobile application development, but there is a distinct difference between custom software application development and software product development and therein lie the issue.
Business Intelligence (BI) solutions have been around for some time. The traditional BI tools were designed to be used by the IT team, business analysts and data scientists and utilized sophisticated features which required specialized knowledge and skills possessed only by the technical and analytical community. In this environment, business users were consumers of content, and while they could access information from dashboards, reports and KPIs, they had very limited access to date and they could not interact with that data. Where users had access to data, BI objects, reports and dashboards were developed, provisioned and presented to them by the IT team, so the business user had no control over what they could see or the format of the data.
‘In the past, business users were restricted to analytical content provided by IT staff and Data Scientists with limited interaction and access to data’
Gartner predicted that ‘…smart/augmented, nonrelational-, search- and visual-based data discovery capabilities will converge into a single set of next generation data discovery capabilities as components of modern BI and analytics platforms.’
In line with Gartner predictions, the new world of Augmented Analytics and Modern BI solutions enables end-users and team members to access and use business intelligence (BI) to combine their industry and functional knowledge with clear, concise data. These new solutions are focused on business users, and on their empowerment, placing the power of true insight into the hands of business users and transitioning business users into Citizen Data Scientists. These solutions provide more value to the organization, improving technology Return on Investment (ROI), Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increasing efficiency with fact-based decisions. Modern BI and Augmented Analytics offers data integration and sophisticated analytical models and techniques in an easy-to-use interface that provides auto-suggestions and recommendations to speed the analytical process and ensure that users get what they need. It also provides report formats, publishing tools, alerts and analysis that can be shared by team members to encourage user adoption and collaboration.
As the needs of the average user evolve, most businesses find that a combination of traditional BI tools and Modern BI tools will best meet the needs of the team and ensure that every team member has the tools they need to get the job done.
Here are the primary features and functionality your business will need to capture Traditional Business Intelligence components and provide comprehensive coverage for your team. These solutions allow the IT staff to provide dashboards and reports for business user consumption and review:
Modern BI and Advanced Analytics – Augmented Analytics enables the transition from business user to Citizen Data Scientist and supports data democratization and data literacy, allowing Data Scientists to focus on strategy and business user access to analytics to perform day-to-day analytics.
‘As the needs of the average user evolve, most businesses find that a combination of traditional BI tools and Modern BI tools will best meet the needs of the team and ensure that every team member has the tools they need to get the job done.’
There are other many other features and components available to support users, IT, business analysts and data scientists in the traditional and modern analytics environment.
To find out more about Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions And Reporting, Contact Us. Discover the power of Augmented Analytics and see how your team can benefit from fact-based decisions, and cost-effective analytics and achieve a market advantage.
If you have chosen MEAN Stack development as the environment in which you wish to develop your project, you are probably wondering whether to attempt an in-house development or to choose an IT partner that is skilled and experienced in MEAN Stack.
No matter the development environment, the enterprise typically does not have enough resources to dedicate to a development project. Adding this type of project to the responsibilities and tasks already assigned to your IT team can mean that your team is pulled away from other critical tasks, and it can create risk. Existing tasks may be delayed, and IT professionals may feel overwhelmed and you may lose team members.
Of course, there is another critical issue here, namely whether your team has MEAN Stack skills. In order to quickly and effectively create your software product or application, your business must ensure that the team assigned to the project has the experience and knowledge needed to assure success.
‘When reviewing the references, capabilities and services of MEAN stack developers and IT partners, the enterprise must ensure that the prospective partner and its team is capable of overseeing the full development lifecycle.’
By engaging a skilled IT partner, you can ensure that the project is completed without a lot of rework, and that all resources and capabilities are available to you to help you achieve success. The cost and time required to complete a project using professional MEAN Stack developers is much more likely to meet enterprise requirements and produce outcomes that satisfy end users, customers, suppliers, partners and stakeholders.
It is estimated that nearly 70% of professional developers are currently using MEAN Stack for projects. To be sure you choose the right partner, you must include the following skills in your vendor review:
‘The cost and time required to complete a project using professional MEAN Stack developers is much more likely to meet enterprise requirements and produce outcomes that satisfy end users, customers, suppliers, partners and stakeholders.’
When reviewing the references, capabilities and services of MEAN stack developers and IT partners, the enterprise must ensure that the prospective partner and its team is capable of overseeing the full development lifecycle.
To engage Mean Stack Development Services, and hire MEAN Stack Programmers, Contact Us today. Find out more about our products and services and our rich history of Partnerships. Find out more about MEAN Stack development with our free article, ‘What is MEAN Stack, What MEAN Stack is NOT, Why Choose MEAN Stack Development and How to Hire MEAN Stack Developers.’
Original Post : Hire MEAN Stack Programmers with Skill and Experience!
When a business is considering a business intelligence or analytics solution, it is important to recognize that today’s solutions are very different than the solutions of the past. Not only do they include more analytical techniques and features, but they have come a long way in providing access to sophisticated analytics for the average enterprise team member.
Harvard Business Review Analytics Service reports that
a) businesses can substantially improve business performance by giving frontline workers modern self-service analytics tools to enable fast intelligent action and,
b) not all self-service analytics provide this effective approach.
The Harvard Business Review Analytics Service surveyed nearly 500 executives and found that they reported significant performance improvement when they empowered frontline workers with augmented analytics. More than one-third of those surveyed noted improvement in customer and employee engagement and in product and service quality.
While some businesses may still be using business intelligence and analytics that are designed for data scientists and IT professionals, most of those are actively working to upgrade and/or migrate to augmented analytics and solutions that are designed for self-serve business user access.
Here’s why:
When the business is ready to acquire augmented analytics or to upgrade from existing, more restrictive solutions designed for professional analytical resources, it is important to choose the right solution – one with sophisticated tools that are presented in an intuitive user interface with auto-suggestions and recommendations to assist business users, and ample personalization of dashboards and reports.
With the right IT consulting partner, you can select and implement an Augmented Analytics Solution with business intelligence (BI) and advanced capabilities, and ensure that every user can leverage these tools, no matter their skillset or technical capabilities. Explore our free white paper, ‘A Roadmap To ROI And User Adoption Of Augmented Analytics And BI Tools.’
Today, even the smallest business depends on technology and software to manage the business process, capture data and move the enterprise forward. No matter the size of a business, executives and managers now realize the value of providing analytics to make decisions. In the past, the analytics process was the sole domain of IT, business analysts and data scientists but today, organizations know that data democratization and data literacy are key to business performance and to keeping pace with the market and with changing customer buying behavior.
In order to accommodate this need, the business must provide easy-to-use analytics solutions that offer sophisticated functionality and features in an intuitive environment so team members can embrace analytics and willingly adopt these solutions.
‘Embedded BI brings the power of analytics closer to the user and allows them to use popular software and apps to achieve analytical goals with a single sign-on approach.’
If you want to take advantage of this approach, there is a consideration you should include in your strategy – and that consideration might surprise you. Consider the number of applications and software products your team uses to complete tasks and to find information. Did you know that, by some estimates, team members lose up to ten (10) percent of their time switching tasks and applications. One of the most frustrating realities an employee can face is trying to gather and analyze data. Suppose you want to analyze sales for a particular location, or a particular sales team for a certain period of time. In the old technology world, you would have to export the data, or you might use an integrated analytics solution and gather the data there by choosing the fields you want to analyze.
Today, you can use Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) to find and analyze data without ever leaving the confines of your sales software. Embedded BI is designed to embed within a popular, familiar software platform. By placing this capability within a familiar application or software solution, the organization gives its team members access to data, pulling information from the system of origin, integrating and streamlining data processing and reporting time.
Embedded BI brings the power of analytics closer to the user and allows them to use popular software and apps to achieve analytical goals with a single sign-on approach, so they don’t lose time switching between software solutions or exporting and importing data. Users have access to dashboards, charts, graphs and analytical tools, all within the ERP, HRM, CRM, SCM or other enterprise solution. Embedded BI allows users to integrate analytics within workflow and collect and analyze data easily.
When considering an Embedded BI solution, be sure you choose one that accommodates access both in the office and on the road, with mobile access that enables business users to take analytics on the road.
‘In order to accommodate this need, the business must provide easy-to-use analytics solutions that offer sophisticated functionality and features in an intuitive environment so team members can embrace analytics and willingly adopt these solutions.’
You can find out more about the Smarten Embedded BI And Integration APIs solution and add powerful functionality and access to existing ERP, SCM, HRMS, CRM or any other products. Provide analytics capabilities within existing products without major Investment. Your business users and your customers will appreciate the ease-of-use and access and you will gain a competitive advantage. Read our White Paper: ‘Making The Case For Embedded BI And Analytics.’
Original Post : Embedded BI Simplifies Business User Analytics!
When the business undertakes a Mobile BI initiative, it must plan carefully to ensure success, achieve rapid return on investment (ROI) and achieve low total cost of ownership (TCO).
There are four primary goals of this exercise:
‘Be sure that the mobile business intelligence solution you choose supports a seamless user experience, and allows users to easily see dashboards, reports etc.’
To achieve these goals, you must assess existing workflow and business processes and ensure that users can incorporate mobile business intelligence within team tasks and activities, that IT can support the environment and that managers can make the best use of the data presented by the team.
Review and Address Culture and Workflow – Take a look at a) the technical skills and technology use of your users, managers and executives, and understand how and when they use data. How is data used (if at all) to make decisions, or gain approval? In order to make the best use of Mobile BI, you will want to integrate this solution into the day-to-day process, and be sure that there is an access loop for executives and managers to receive and review data from users.
Establish Objectives and Metrics – We discussed the fact that you must understand your requirements, but you should also use those requirements to define objectives for the project and to set metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that will tell you that the users are leveraging the mobile business intelligence solution, and that the data produced is having a positive impact on organizational goals. Be sure to create a review process for metrics, so that you can identify trends and modify metrics and processes to adapt to change.
Review Data Accessibility and Quality – Ensure that your users have access to accurate data. Do you have a process in place to allow for data gathering, cleansing and validation? Have you eliminated redundant or duplicate records? Is the data you wish to use in Mobile BI easily integrated and accessible? Your users will not want to go to another source to get information so, if you want them to use Mobile BI tools, you must make the right information available to them within the Mobile BI environment.
Review the Need for User Training – Even when your users have access to most intuitive solutions, you may wish to have a simple training session to be sure that all users understand a) what is expected of them, b) how to use the solution most effectively and c) how to get help if they have questions or issues.
Reports and Visualization – Be sure that the mobile business intelligence solution you choose supports a seamless user experience, and allows users to easily see dashboards, reports etc. so that they can incorporate data and reporting into their staff reports, their meetings, and their recommendations to management without expensive, time-consuming report customization or custom visualization designs.
User and Data Volume – Be sure that you plan for expansion of the mobile BI solution. As you add departments, divisions, user groups and additional data sources, you will want to ensure that your devices, network, and mobile BI solution can support the additional load, and still perform well.
The Data-Driven Organization – It is all well and good to encourage your users to work with data, to analyze information and use that information to present ideas and solutions to management, but if the executive team or the middle managers do not accept and reward the use of data in decision-making, the mobile BI solution will be just another toy. Staff assessments and career evaluations should support fact-based decision making and discourage guesswork and opinion as a means to drawing conclusions. Team members and managers should solicit and encourage the use of data during staff meetings and to support reports and decisions.
‘Assess existing workflow and business processes and ensure that users can incorporate mobile business intelligence within team tasks and activities, that IT can support the environment and that managers can make the best use of the data presented by the team.’
In this article, we have discussed the importance of successful integration of Mobile BI into business practices.
For a comprehensive discussion of Mobile BI and related topics, read our article: ‘What Is Mobile Business Intelligence (BI), How Can It Help Your Business, And What You Should Know Before You Decide.’
In this article, we have defined mobile business intelligence (BI), and discussed the benefits of this type of solution, Contact Us to find out how Mobile Business Intelligence solutions can help your business achieve objectives, and explore the potential of Augmented Analytics Products. Discover the features of Business Intelligence and Reporting, and Download A Free Trial Of Smarten Analytics Software.
Explore our complementary articles on Mobile BI: ‘Choose The Right Mobile BI Vendor To Ensure Success,’ ‘How Can Mobile BI Help Your Business?’ ‘Ensure User Adoption of Mobile BI,’ and ‘What Is Mobile Business Intelligence (BI), How Can It Help Your Business, And What You Should Know Before You Decide.’
