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| Screenshot from https://www.oracle.com/solutions/business-analytics/day-by-day.html |
Companies spent most of 2017 either preparing their journey
to the Cloud, getting started on moving their applications to the Cloud, or
hoping the whole Cloud thing would go away if we just ignored it long enough
(like my late fees at Blockbuster). But in the end, the Cloud isn’t
revolutionary: the Cloud just means someone else is managing your server for
you. While it’s nice that your servers are now someone else’s problem, there is
an actual revolution happening in reporting & analysis and it’s a
technology that’s been around for decades.
The Future of Reporting & Analysis Can Also Take Selfies
Up to this point, mobile has been an afterthought in the
world of reporting & analysis: we design for a laptop first and if
something ends up mobile-enabled, that’s a nice-to-have. The commonly held
belief is that mobile devices (phones, tablets) are too small of a footprint to
show formatted reports or intricate dashboards. That belief is correct in the
same way that Microsoft Outlook is way too complex of an application to make
reading emails on a mobile device practical… except that most emails in the
world are now read on a mobile device. They’re just not using Outlook. We had
to rethink of a smaller, faster, easier, more intuitive (sorry, Microsoft) way
of consuming information to take email mobile.
Reporting & analysis will also hit that tipping point in
2018 where we ask ourselves simply “what questions do I need answered to make
better business decisions faster?” and then our phones will give us exactly
that without all the detail a typical report or dashboard provides. Will mobile
analytics kill off desktop applications? No more than the desktop killed off
paper reports. They all have their place: paper reports are good for quickly
looking at a large amount of formatted information, desktops will be good for
details (Excel will live on for the foreseeable future), and mobile will take its
rightful place as the dominant form of information consumption.
Forget the Past and Pay Attention to the Present
The greatest thing about mobile is that everyone has their
phone less than six feet from them at all times [you just glanced over at yours
to see if I’m right]. But would you ever look at your phone if your screen took
a month to update? Traditional reports are very backwards-looking. Your typical
Income Statement, for instance, tells you how you spent the last year, it
sometimes tells you about the upcoming forecast, but it rarely tells you, “am I
making money at this moment?” Just like the dashboard of a car would be awfully
useless if it gave you last month’s average gas tank reading – hey, I was 75%
full in December! – mobile reports won’t be for looking at historically dated
information. Instead, we’ll look to mobile to give us just the information we
need to take physical actions now.
But Why is 2018 the Year of Mobile Analytics?
Quite simply, we didn’t have the technology to support our decisions
until now. While we could take reports or dashboards and interact with them on
mobile devices, we don’t want to actually perform analytics on our phones. We
want the computers doing the analysis for us. While we’ve had data mining for
years, it was relegated to high-priced data scientists or not-so-highly-paid
analysts.
We now have artificial intelligence that can look through our
data 24/7 and with no guidance from us, determine what drivers correlate with
which results. Machine learning can then determine which information it
delivers do we truly find useful. And so we don’t have to dig through all the
results to find out what the system is trying to tell us, the mobile analytics
apps in 2018 will convert complex information into natural language. It will
simply tell us in plain English (or your language of choice), “I looked through
all your information and here are the things you need to be aware of right
now.”
While that may seem like distant promises to many people,
it’s here now. At Oracle’s OpenWorld 2017 conference, there was an amazing
demonstration of everything I mentioned in the last paragraph. The audience was
even more amazed when told that all that functionality would be in Oracle
Analytics Cloud before OpenWorld 2018. I’m sure the employees of Microsoft,
Tableau, QlikView, and others are either busy working on their own technological
magic or they’re busier working on their resumés.
Am I Ready for the Future?
Start finding out at EPM.BI/Survey. Each year, I conduct a
global survey of Business Analytics. Last year, I asked over 250 companies how
they were doing in the world of reporting, analysis, planning, and
consolidation. To participate in this
year’s survey, go to EPM.BI/Survey and spend 15 minutes answering
questions about your State of Business Analytics that you maybe haven’t thought
of in years. In exchange for filling in the survey, you’ll be invited to a
webcast on January 31, 2018, at 1PM Eastern, where you’ll learn how your BI &
EPM (Business Intelligence & Enterprise Performance Management) stacks up
against the rest of the world.
If you have any questions, ask them in the comments or tweet
them to me @ERoske.
