9 tips for Mobile BI succes
9 tips for Mobile BI success
Full article
http://www.yellowfinbi.com/YFCommunityNews-Mobile-Business-Intelligen...
Brief
The results of the IT Executive Outlook survey indicate that there
remains a significant level of doubt, or even scepticism, surrounding
the implementation and adoption of mobile information sharing
strategies and technologies within the enterprise. In response, we’ve
compiled nine tips for success for those considering Mobile BI:
[1] Get onboard or get left behind:
Respected industry expert, Howard Dresner, stated in the wake of his
most recent Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study that
advancements in technology, shifts in information consumption and the
rapid up-take of mobile data sharing strategies within many
organizations, have led him to conclude that Mobile BI is the new
platform for BI itself.
[2] Choose a vendor that offers browser-based, native MA:
With the continued adoption of HTML 5 to support device-based caching,
the debate between delivering reporting and analytics remotely via a
Web-browser or device-specific application will continue. Select a BI
application that offers both to give you flexibility. Whatever the
choice (and it must be a unified one), ensure that the needs of the
information consumer (rather than the report writer) dictates your
chosen approach.
[3] Secure your data assets:
The prevalence of mobile computing and information sharing at the
enterprise level brings with it a plethora of new security risks.
Ensure your data is secure at the application and device level.
Application: Your BI application and its accompanying mobile platform
should easily integrate with existing security protocols to support
authorization and authentication. It should also be 100 percent Web-
based to ensure no data is stored on the actual device.
Device: A password protection system on the device should guard
against unauthorized access to sensitive business data. Additionally,
an automatic lockout system should log users out from a dashboard or
report after a significant period of inactivity.
Broadcast security: Establish and ensure a clear method and system for
segmenting mobile user groups based on their specific job function and
information needs.
[4] Interactivity on-the-go:
Give users the ability to consume, analyze and interact with business
data on their mobile devices the same as they would from their PC.
Select a Mobile BI platform that offers a range of native applications
for major operating systems to allow users to filter results and
reports, drill-down and through data, as well as comment on and share
reports to make critical business decisions in real-time.
[5] Device independent:
Your chosen MA should support total device independence to ensure
higher rates of productivity and faster ROI. Users should be able to
log into their existing BI account and gain instant access to their
report content remotely, without the need to re-create content for the
mobile platform, or repackage it for mobile distribution.
[6] Take advantage of native mobile device features:
Many popular tablets and smartphones (including the iPhone, iPad and
Android family) have amazing intuitive functionality such as multi-
touch interfaces and generous screen sizes. Select a mobile platform
with native applications that support this highly beneficial
functionality.
[7] Carefully consider who actually needs Mobile BI:
Not everybody in an organization needs Mobile BI. Carefully establish
specific user groups based on their likely need for reporting and
analytics on-the-go. Many departments or job functions will not need
to address problems in real-time or are almost entirely desk-bound –
the point of enabling such user groups with Mobile BI is moot.
[8] Define which information will be useful remotely:
There will be limited or no benefit in consuming certain data types
remotely. Establish the specific benefits of being able to consume
specific types of information from mobile devices. Carefully identify
which alerts, reports and dashboards are capable of driving
performance or mitigating risk by being received on mobile devices.
[9] Establish ROI:
Outline the expected business benefits of Mobile BI pre-rollout
(enhanced productivity of user groups, etc) and match them with both
initial and ongoing costs (mobile devices, software, hardware,
maintenance, etc).
The Cash Free Way to Increase Your Cash Flow -- e-book!
The Cash Free Way to Increase Your Cash Flow -- e-book!
So if you need to increase your monthly cash flow then you will benefit from my e-book.
Watch this blog for the "The Cash Free Way to Increase Your Cash Flow" e-book soon.
Cheers
-- WT Paige
More BI Packages Add Collaboration
Tibco is now squeezing on board, joining the likes of Actuate, Adaptive Planning, Birst, LogiXML, and QlikTech, and others that have added collaborative features in 2011. I'm not saying BI vendors shouldn't be adding these features, but as we learned at last week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference, it's hard enough for enterprises to figure out their general-purpose collaboration strategies, as they try to decide how to mimic the influence of social networks inside companies. SharePoint isn't going to easily operate as a social platform for most companies without help from other software, conclude analysts Tony Byrne of the Real Story Group and Rob Koplowitz at Forrester Research. Facebook and Google are likely to launch business social networks, says tech blogger Robert Scoble, which would confuse the collaboration market more.
If enterprises are wrestling with sort out these choices, are they really ready for another layer of collaborative tools around their BI? And what about collaborative tools proposed by supply chain management vendors, or talent management vendors, or performance management vendors, or customer relationship management vendors? Just how many tools and interfaces are you prepared to support? Continuity, usability, training and licensing efficiencies will surely suffer if you offer too many options.
To its credit, Tibco has tried to avoid a siloed approach by integrating with Microsoft SharePoint, as well as Tibco's own enterprise-focused Tibbr social networking option. The SharePoint part is a smart choice given that more than 100 million people are licensed to use that software, according to Microsoft stats. By letting users post Spotfire dashboards, reports and data visualizations alongside Word documents, spreadsheets and team-collaboration environments in SharePoint, Tibco is promoting what it calls contextual collaboration.
But when it comes to enterprise social networking, Tibco insists the capabilities built into SharePoint and Microsoft Outlook aren't adequate. That's where Tibco's Tibbr social platform comes in. Tibbr is aimed at supporting collaboration across multiple applications and environments, not just BI and analytics. These characteristics also apply to SharePoint and Outlook, in my book, but Tibco Spotfire's Lou Bajuk, senior director of product management, insists Tibbr "brings collaboration into one environment and ties into multiple systems more effectively than you can do with SharePoint."
Tibbr was released in 2009, and Tibco claims it has more than 40,000 individual users. The company couldn't come up with any customers using both Spotfire and Tibbr, but it did refer me to Spotfire customer Wildhorse Resources, a small, Texas-based oil and gas company that's considering using SharePoint and Tibbr together.
With just 70 employees, most of whom are on a single floor in an office building in Houston, Wildhorse doesn't have a big collaboration challenge today. But Steve Habachy, vice president of operations, says the firm is looking at SharePoint to provide a single place -- portal, content repository, he's not hung up on the term -- where all information about particular oil fields and wells can be accessed. That might include documents, spreadsheets, Spotfire analyses and so on. Tibbr, meanwhile, would provide a kind of corporate Facebook, a familiar and user-friendly interface with big advantages over email.
"Tone is hard to get across in e-mail and I think people are more comfortable when they communicate through a Facebook-type interface," Habachy explains. "You see a picture, the person is typically smiling, and people don't assume the worst and think people are being critical as they often do when you're communicating by email."
I'm guessing Wildhorse will soon find a lot of overlapping capabilities between SharePoint, Outlook, and Tibbr. Microsoft builds a lot of collaborative functionality -- including presence awareness, personal profiles, and Facebook-style social networking -- into the combination of SharePoint and Outlook.
Collaboration strategy goes well beyond BI and analytics, and business leaders have a lot of broad choices they're trying to figure out well before going after the niche needs. There may well be a place for BI-specific collaboration options, particularly when it gets down into details that can't be addressed by the general-purpose tools, such as drilling down into root-cause data analysis below the top-layer dashboards and reports. If it's free functionality that vendors are simply adding to their existing BI systems, so much the better. But even then, you have to watch out for collaborative featuress overlaps, and collaboration overload.
If enterprises are wrestling with sort out these choices, are they really ready for another layer of collaborative tools around their BI? And what about collaborative tools proposed by supply chain management vendors, or talent management vendors, or performance management vendors, or customer relationship management vendors? Just how many tools and interfaces are you prepared to support? Continuity, usability, training and licensing efficiencies will surely suffer if you offer too many options.
To its credit, Tibco has tried to avoid a siloed approach by integrating with Microsoft SharePoint, as well as Tibco's own enterprise-focused Tibbr social networking option. The SharePoint part is a smart choice given that more than 100 million people are licensed to use that software, according to Microsoft stats. By letting users post Spotfire dashboards, reports and data visualizations alongside Word documents, spreadsheets and team-collaboration environments in SharePoint, Tibco is promoting what it calls contextual collaboration.
But when it comes to enterprise social networking, Tibco insists the capabilities built into SharePoint and Microsoft Outlook aren't adequate. That's where Tibco's Tibbr social platform comes in. Tibbr is aimed at supporting collaboration across multiple applications and environments, not just BI and analytics. These characteristics also apply to SharePoint and Outlook, in my book, but Tibco Spotfire's Lou Bajuk, senior director of product management, insists Tibbr "brings collaboration into one environment and ties into multiple systems more effectively than you can do with SharePoint."
Tibbr was released in 2009, and Tibco claims it has more than 40,000 individual users. The company couldn't come up with any customers using both Spotfire and Tibbr, but it did refer me to Spotfire customer Wildhorse Resources, a small, Texas-based oil and gas company that's considering using SharePoint and Tibbr together.
With just 70 employees, most of whom are on a single floor in an office building in Houston, Wildhorse doesn't have a big collaboration challenge today. But Steve Habachy, vice president of operations, says the firm is looking at SharePoint to provide a single place -- portal, content repository, he's not hung up on the term -- where all information about particular oil fields and wells can be accessed. That might include documents, spreadsheets, Spotfire analyses and so on. Tibbr, meanwhile, would provide a kind of corporate Facebook, a familiar and user-friendly interface with big advantages over email.
"Tone is hard to get across in e-mail and I think people are more comfortable when they communicate through a Facebook-type interface," Habachy explains. "You see a picture, the person is typically smiling, and people don't assume the worst and think people are being critical as they often do when you're communicating by email."
I'm guessing Wildhorse will soon find a lot of overlapping capabilities between SharePoint, Outlook, and Tibbr. Microsoft builds a lot of collaborative functionality -- including presence awareness, personal profiles, and Facebook-style social networking -- into the combination of SharePoint and Outlook.
Collaboration strategy goes well beyond BI and analytics, and business leaders have a lot of broad choices they're trying to figure out well before going after the niche needs. There may well be a place for BI-specific collaboration options, particularly when it gets down into details that can't be addressed by the general-purpose tools, such as drilling down into root-cause data analysis below the top-layer dashboards and reports. If it's free functionality that vendors are simply adding to their existing BI systems, so much the better. But even then, you have to watch out for collaborative featuress overlaps, and collaboration overload.
DB2 best practices: Implementing DB2 workload management in a data warehouse
Using a staged approach, this article guides you through the steps needed to implement the best practices workload management configuration on IBM® DB2 ® for Linux®, UNIX®, and Windows® with sufficient controls to help ensure a stable, predictable system for most data warehouse environments. This initial configuration is intended to be a good base for implementing additional tuning and configuration changes as needed, in order for you to achieve your specific workload management objectives.
In this article
This article presents a set of definitions representing the different stages of maturity for a workload management configuration in a DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows database. These stages range from stage 0 through to the advanced stage 3 configuration. A specific configuration template and process is provided as part of these best practices to enable customers to progress from a stage 0 configuration to a stage 2 configuration. General descriptions and advice are also given about common stage 3 scenarios.
The article assumes a novice beginner and describes the individual steps and mechanisms at each point. A more experienced user can condense many of the listed steps to move from stage 1 to stage 2, making the transition in days of elapsed time rather than weeks as the suggested timeline indicates in a later section.
The steps outlined in this document are focused on the efficiency of the system as a whole, regardless of where the work itself comes from. It is important to note that achieving the goal of a stable system might not necessarily also result in the achievement of any individual application service-level agreement (SLA) or specific performance objectives for queries. These more granular objectives might require subsequent changes to the workload management configuration, such as outlined in the section on stage 3 scenarios, which is outside the main scope of this document.
This article is not a tutorial on DB2 workload management capabilities and does not attempt to provide comprehensive guidance in addressing all possible scenarios where DB2 workload management might be employed. It also does not cover all features within the DB2 product that might be of use in controlling resource consumption. The scope of this article is focused on describing the system stabilization approach in some detail and provides some general guidance for common advanced scenarios.
Downloads
Information about download methods Get Adobe® Reader®
Resources
Learn
Paul Bird is a senior technical staff member (STSM) within the IBM Software Group development organization, sharing his time between the Optim and DB2 development organizations. Since 1991, he has worked on the inside of the DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows product as a lead developer and architect with a focus on diverse areas such as workload management, monitoring, security, and general SQL processing. He recently became a member of the Optim development organization to expand his experiences. You can reach him at pbird@ca.ibm.com. 
Rimas Kalesnykas is a technical writer for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. In the last 5 years, he was the documentation owner for a variety of DB2 subject areas, including the Command and API references, the Partitioning and Clustering Guide, Troubleshooting, and Workload Management. In 2008, he was a co-author of a best practices paper that describes how to improve data server utilization and management through virtualization. You can reach him at rimask@ca.ibm.com.
In this article
This article presents a set of definitions representing the different stages of maturity for a workload management configuration in a DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows database. These stages range from stage 0 through to the advanced stage 3 configuration. A specific configuration template and process is provided as part of these best practices to enable customers to progress from a stage 0 configuration to a stage 2 configuration. General descriptions and advice are also given about common stage 3 scenarios.
The article assumes a novice beginner and describes the individual steps and mechanisms at each point. A more experienced user can condense many of the listed steps to move from stage 1 to stage 2, making the transition in days of elapsed time rather than weeks as the suggested timeline indicates in a later section.
The steps outlined in this document are focused on the efficiency of the system as a whole, regardless of where the work itself comes from. It is important to note that achieving the goal of a stable system might not necessarily also result in the achievement of any individual application service-level agreement (SLA) or specific performance objectives for queries. These more granular objectives might require subsequent changes to the workload management configuration, such as outlined in the section on stage 3 scenarios, which is outside the main scope of this document.
This article is not a tutorial on DB2 workload management capabilities and does not attempt to provide comprehensive guidance in addressing all possible scenarios where DB2 workload management might be employed. It also does not cover all features within the DB2 product that might be of use in controlling resource consumption. The scope of this article is focused on describing the system stabilization approach in some detail and provides some general guidance for common advanced scenarios.
Downloads
| Description | Name | Size | Download method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Article in PDF format | DB2BP_Workload_Management_1111.pdf | 1.21MB | HTTP |
| Sample scripts | DB2BP_WLM_Supplements_1111.zip | 446KB | HTTP |
Resources
Learn
- Learn more about DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows in the DB2 Information Center.
- Learn more about IBM Smart Analytics System.
- "DB2 Workload Management using Performance Optimization Feature" (developerWorks, Jun 2010): In this demo, see how a fictional company uses DB2 Workload Management and Optim Performance Manager Extended Edition to allocate database system resources to help a high priority application achieve its objectives in a data warehousing environment.
- "DB2 9.7: Using new Workload Manager features" (developerWorks, Aug 2010): This tutorial provides a series of exercises to help the new user become familiar with Workload Manager.
- " DB2 workload management histograms" (developerWorks, Oct 2008): This 3-part article series introduces the concept of histograms and explains how to use them with with DB2 workload management.
- "An inside look at DB2 Advanced Enterprise Server Edition, Part 3: Workload management" (developerWorks, Sep 2011): This article spotlights the capabilities and benefits offered by DB2 Workload Manager, included in IBM DB2 AESE.
- Learn more about DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows at the DB2 page on developerWorks and get the resources you need to grow your skills.
- Follow developerWorks on Twitter.
- Watch developerWorks on-demand demos advanced functionality for experienced developers.
- Download a trial version of DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows.
- Participate in the discussion forum.
- Get involved in the My developerWorks community. Connect with other developerWorks users while exploring the developer-driven blogs, forums, groups, and wikis.
Paul Bird is a senior technical staff member (STSM) within the IBM Software Group development organization, sharing his time between the Optim and DB2 development organizations. Since 1991, he has worked on the inside of the DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows product as a lead developer and architect with a focus on diverse areas such as workload management, monitoring, security, and general SQL processing. He recently became a member of the Optim development organization to expand his experiences. You can reach him at pbird@ca.ibm.com. Rimas Kalesnykas is a technical writer for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. In the last 5 years, he was the documentation owner for a variety of DB2 subject areas, including the Command and API references, the Partitioning and Clustering Guide, Troubleshooting, and Workload Management. In 2008, he was a co-author of a best practices paper that describes how to improve data server utilization and management through virtualization. You can reach him at rimask@ca.ibm.com.
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