Oracle’s new BI Mobile App Designer recently unveiled by the business intelligence giant runs in a browser and has a drag-and-drop design format. This allows end- users to mash up graphs, tables and other types of data to, ask Oracle puts it, “create mobile analytical apps tailor-made to their lines of business.”
The use of HTML5 allows the apps to run across iOS, Android and Windows based devices with users able to share apps via an App Library catalog. Part of the larger Business Foundation Suite and also included in the BI Mobile option for their Enterprise Edition it is being positioned as a self-service product.
As Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson observes, “‘The self-service’ term has many interpretations, it’s not just yes or no, there are many shades of gray.” He cautioned that “self-service” has a number of concerns to consider.
He reminds that “‘intuitive and ‘user friendly’ are subjective terms” in a Forrester Report on self-service BI released last year, “A point-and-click and drag-and-drop graphical user interface (GUI) may be a nirvana of intuitiveness to an information management pro who started his computer career working with punch cards or green-screen terminals, but to a younger generation of knowledge workers brought up on search GUI from Google and social media GUI from Facebook, a point- and-click GUI may not be as obvious or natural.”
Paul Rodwick, Oracle’s Vice President of Product Management however states that “Purpose-built mobile analytical apps, created and used by business people every day, greatly expand the opportunities for companies to deploy analytics broadly to everyone, everywhere. The new Oracle BI mobile capability enables business users to deliver powerful analytic apps self-sufficiently, for use on any mobile device, to improve business outcomes and ensure everyone is effective while on the go.”
Businesses will still need help to take advantage on these new tools.
There are a number of organizations both in the U.S. and offshore that have years of experience developing in the Oracle and Microsoft Business Intelligence arena. The addition of these new tools simply adds to their arsenal of BI solutions and speeds their development cycles to your advantage. Companies who either lack the bandwidth or the in-house staff to focus on developing new applications may wish to seek the help of an offshore development team.
In many cases these outsourced additions to your “arsenal” will let you take full advantage of the advances, largely driven by the need to mine “Big Data”, and save your company both dollars and conserve internal resources for more “mission critical” projects.
