With the continuous extension of mobile enablement in 2012, the Mobile Analytics suite of SAP offers the possibility of reaching the overall expectation of your business community in terms of dashboard requirements on mobile devices.
In this blog, I will share some examples of solutions that we have delivered at SAP to our internal Lines of Business, and how we can answer our needs using the right technology.
Explore and discover a maxim of information in a dashboard
A first use case of dashboards is when you need to compile different views of your data into a single framework, enabling your Business Users to slice and dice in all directions (dimensions) to find out all the information they need.
In this scenario, the main keyword is “freedom”. From a starting view on the data, you allow the End User the possibility to go to a completely different visualization from a data prospective and from a chart prospective.
This scenario fits perfectly with Exploration Views, one of the most recent features of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer offering a multi-view capability.
Advantages of this are the ease of creation, on top of HANA and/or universes – even a non-technical user can create these views – and the very large spectrum of data discovery offered to the End Users. In addition, the organization of the content, like a book with chapters and pages, is extremely convenient to guide your business community.
Perform complex, multi-dimensional analysis with guided navigation
If the first example is intended for “quick information to fast decision”, there are also scenarios where the primary need is to perform detailed analysis on different measures driving your business. In this case, the primary need is to the End User (generally a Business Analyst) the possibility to go as deep as needed into the details of the analysis, generally through successive levels of granularity/hierarchy.
SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio gives this possibility: the native connectivity to SAP Netweaver and SAP HANA offers the largest range in this type of business context. This tool is more technical than Exploration Views and the development is primarily intended for IT people and technical Business Power Users. The current version is mainly focused on analysis with high scalability and performance.
Interactive Performance dashboards for executives
Reaching the expectation executives have may require a complex combination of content, display, and interactivity in a way that is telling a story, not only showing data. We generally compare this as an advertisement: how to catch attention within a few seconds and give the right message(s) in less than 1 minute? This is the challenging goal you need to target.
SAP Dashboards (aka Xcelsius) offers this possibility and the recent HTML5 enablement since has allowed us to already rollout a few solutions where the context was exactly as described above.
With SAP BI Mobile, the User Experience and visual display have been optimized for each type of mobile device. In this context, web Intelligence can also be leveraged to create Operational Dashboards like “Reporting cockpits”. This is where the power of web Intelligence - support of multiple data providers, function language, and formatting – takes its full advantage to deliver solutions with high scalability and performance.
In conclusion, there is not one sole technology or several for Mobile Analytics. There is a business need and the right tool to address it. With the convergence of all Mobile Analytics into one single App (SAP BI Mobile), this technological question becomes transparent to the End User, who can access all his assets into the same mobile Application with no need to know which tool is behind.
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