News Feature | February 1, 2017

Accessibility, Mobility Key Requirements For Business Intelligence Users

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

business intelligence

Seventy percent of users consider mobile BI software "crucial" to their work.

Accessibility and mobility are the top priorities for today's typical business intelligence (BI) user, requiring mobile, fast, and customizable platform options. This in turn puts intense pressure on platform providers to evolve quickly to meet the demand from customers.

In fact, 70 percent of data analytics users say a mobile application is critical to their use of BI software according to findings of a survey from B2B ratings and review firm Clutch. Even among those who don’t consider a mobile application crucial, nearly 60 percent said they recognize mobile BI applications as increasingly important to their business.

And while Clutch's 2016 BI survey found only 41 percent of data analytics users even used a mobile phone or tablet to access their BI data, the number who think mobility is crucial to their use of the software is now almost double that number. As businesses evolve with hyper-paced work environments with greater demands for complex analytics performed on-the-go, the demand for powerful, flexible, easy-to-use, mobile BI platforms has also increased.

“Simple dashboards on mobile exist in most BI tools out there,” says Yair Weinberger, CTO and Co-Founder of Alooma, a data warehousing and analytics platform. “But mobile BI software for data analytics users who want to research deeper, drill down into the data, or split the data according to some parameters or features, is still lacking.”

Data analytics users don’t just want speed and simplicity, however; they want reliability in their BI tools. Accessing their data is “not simple” according to 31 percent of users, while 36 percent say they wait, on average, more than a day to gain access to their data. Conversely, less than 20 percent of respondents say they typically only wait a few minutes to gain access to their data. In the business intelligence industry, time really does mean money, so time delays of hours or more to access data can pose a serious problem.

Business Solutions Magazine recently outlined a list of BI trends to watch for in 2017, including data discovery/visualization, self-service BI, and data quality/master data management.