Business Intelligence For The Mobile Crowd

Cognos is testing a wireless version of its entire suite of business
intelligence reports.

If all goes well with beta testing this month, the solution will be
available for users of BlackBerry devices from Research in Motion in the first half of 2007.

The solution will allow executives to view and interact with the same Cognos
business intelligence reports and in the same manner as they do on their
desktops.


This has implications for the increasing number of executives who spend
significant amounts of time away from their desks.

Don Campbell, vice president of platform strategy and technology, told
internetnews.com that Cognos wants to help its customers get more out
their investments in business intelligence.

“We can also touch more users within our customer base,” he said.


Cognos 8 Go Mobile will be available as a rich client application that is
pushed out to mobile devices by IT departments.

This means it won’t have to be installed or configured by end users.

Users will be able to interact with reports in several ways.

They will be able to get drill-down details by hovering over a
chart, and will be able to flip columns into rows to make it easier to
scroll through tables on a BlackBerry.

Cognos Mobile

For the love of piecharting on a BlackBerry.

Source: Cognos

And users will be able to review reports whether they’re online.


When they are online, they will be able to pull down as many reports as
they want, and they will be able to forward reports as well.

Most files are compressed down to below 15kb, meaning they won’t take long
to send and receive.

That small file size should also let users download a large number of
reports.

Cognos is certainly not the first business intelligence solutions vendor to
offer a mobile applications.

But other mobile business intelligence solutions have significant drawbacks.

For instance, most require IT to build reports all over again for the new
environment.

One important advantage of the Cognos solution over previous generations,
said Jack Gold, principal analyst with J. Gold Associates, is that customers
can use the same versions of reports as are used on their desktops.

It’s becoming increasingly important for vendors to make these applications
friendlier to both IT departments and end users, alike.

According to Gold, mobility is on the rise.

“The trend we’re seeing is that 75 percent of business executives are going
to be out of the office at least 25 percent of the time,” he told
internetnews.com.

“You can’t expect users to be fixed in one place anymore,” he added.

“If you’re stuck with the notion of having an alerting capability that only
works on a PC, you’re not going to get critical information out to folks,
and then the value of that information diminishes.”

By rolling out this kind of solution, said Gold, Cognos is ensuring that it
will not lose customers to other vendors who will inevitably offer mobile
solutions of their own.

“It’s more about customer retention than customer acquisition,” he said.

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