Enterprise Dashboard Digest

The idea of “Business Intelligence On the Go” relies squarely on the business dashboard. The ability to convey big ideas in a small space makes the dashboard, specifically the small portlets or widgets contained in dashboards, the perfect vehicle to provide business metrics to people on the go. The problem has been the platforms that these tiny dashboards can be distributed to. After years of bleeding edge experimentation, it appears that Windows Mobile, RIM (Blackberry) and Symbian devices have survived to be the default platforms that mobile business intelligence can be brought to.

Let’s look at what Cognos has been doing on these mobile platforms with their Cognos 8 Go! Mobile architecture. The main idea over at Cognos is that their architecture allows deployment of business intelligence to the mobile BI world without needing to re-author for the wireless device. Because there is no need to build and maintain a separate mobile BI deployment, the workflows stay the same. Business users can receive actual Cognos 8 BI reports that can be viewed through the native mobile device behaviors (scrolling, touch screen, clicking, etc). The clients (mobile phones) automatically format the data for viewing.

It’s easier to show you than to tell you, so let’s take a look at some images.

Here’s a Cognos dashboard on Windows Mobile:

As you see, we have typical Cognos dashboard charts, but on your Windows Mobile device! There is a map chart, pie chart, dials/gauges, and various bar charts.

Let’s take a look at some scorecards and BI dashboards for some of the other mobile devices.

Here is the same Cognos BI report on the Symbian S60:

The Blackberry probably has the largest corporate presence at this time, so let’s take a look at what the Cognos dashboards look like on the RIM platform:

Here is the Blackberry 8800 Scorecard:

And here are a couple of other Blackberries. Note how the Cognos Icon appears on the Blackberry desktop:

You can drill down onto the report you wish to view. In this screenshot, the user is selecting a performance dashboard:

The scrollbars that you see are the native Blackberry ones. In this next screenshot of the dashboard, you can see charts and red/green/yellow icon indicators showing status and trend information. On the left side, the yellow highlighting shows the focus from using the scrollwheel. On the right side, you can see a live scorecard application.

This next series of mobile dashboards shows how you can focus on key data and search for data.

And finally in this screenshot, here’s how you can interact with the charts themselves. You can focus on a chart and zoom in or out as well as send the report to someone else.

Tags: Mobile Dashboards, Business Intelligence Charts on Cellular and other mobile devices, cognos 8 GO! Mobile Scorecards and Dashboards, Cell phone dashboards, executive dashboard, pda phone dashboards