The Mobile Dashboard – Your Window to Business Intelligence- Valutrics
The Mobile Dashboard For Business Productivity
Business and IT are usually in a strained relationship at best. Like a married couple, they rarely see eye to eye, and eachplains that the other does not give the due respect and attention to them. This discord stems from the fact the historically IT has delivered technology while the business has been asking for outputs usable in growth and decision making. The advent of mobility has alleviated the situation somewhat. Executives now enjoy access to information on the go. This helps them assess the situation and take relevant decisions in real time. Being equipped with the tools of the trade on the go has been a boon to the executives, sales people, and field services agents alike. One such business productivity tool that has benefited senior management the world over is the mobile dashboard.
Evolution of the Mobile Dashboard
In its earliest form, reporting was a cumbersome task, where applications would store data and the executives had to run queries ormands to extract the same in the form of reports. Sometimes, the data had to be exported to excel and then manipulated to get the required report. Then came the ‘scheduled’ or ‘automated’ reports, where the manual process described above was scripted to be run at scheduled intervals and produce the transcripts automatically. The next evolution saw the emergence of the dashboards, where real time or near real time reports could be viewed in a web based or client based interface in the form of various graphs, charts, and other visual and textual mechanisms. In this case, the displays fed off of the current data set from different data sources.
And now, the dashboards are going mobile (mDB). To make ‘informed’ decisions, the users have to have access to ‘information’, and what better tool to be informed than the colorful panels filled with relevant information.
Advantages of Mobile Dashboards
1. Information, not data: Users today don’t have the time or patience to sift through data to make sense of things. The want figures and information they can use as is. This need is well fulfilled by the mDBs, since they provide the users with relevant metrics like KPIs, KRAs, funnel reports, and other analytics that help them make decisions.
2. Real time: The information available to the users is not dated. It is current. This is a big benefit of the model. If you are doing a budget review, and the numbers on your screen are a week old, and you are missing two large deals closed last week, it is a useless exercise.
3. Intuitive: The dashboards are designed not for beauty (although aesthetics play a big role in the design), but to be useful and relevant. The reports and data available are something you can employ in your work. Event eh format of the displays is for easy understanding.
4. On the go: The mDBs are well, mobile by definition. You have access to information anywhere, anytime. When your client calls to check on the status of a shipment or your boss calls you to update on a deal, you have everything handy.
5. Customizable: A very useful feature of mobile dashboards is that you can customize them as per your needs. Not all reports are relevant to every job function. The ability to see only what you want to see is a major advantage.
6. Drill-down: Sometimes you want details. For times like these, you need to be able to drill down to the exact record from the fancy chart.
The iPad Dashboard application from Copper Mobile is a highly effective business intelligence tool. The analysis and monitoring oriented application gives you one click access to corporate, team, and external information in an organized manner.