Since I was not able to finish all information I read in week 8, on friday februari 8th 2008, I opened a new post for some remaining information articles I read and the knowledge I gained from these.

Choosing a BI Architecture for Mobile Devices

There’s a shift from BI professionals to rank-and-file workers. Simplified there is more need for mobile BI, accessing information while away from the office. Smart Phones and laptops are used frequently for this access.

Mobile BI also raises a few questions; Which technology best suits the organizations’ needs? What’s the total Cost of Ownership? What are the total operating costs of the mobile BI Solution? Will users flock to the new technology or jusitfy the investments? Will the technology complement existing investments or make them obsolete?

If you speak about technology, then the user wants to access the information with any device he or she is using (consistency / device-independent / uninterupted). On the other hand, the IT people want the solution to run on the existing hardware, software and network standards. There are two kinds of BI architectures that can be used THICK and THIN client(s). The first is fully dependent on application(s) running on the device, which facilitates the presentation of BI. The THIN version depends on WEB technology and is fully independent of the device, BUT depends on the existance of internet / web on the device.

The last Mobile BI Architecture (via Web) is the most used now-a-days. Since the mobile devices are NOT desktop / laptops, the BI solution should only deliver the relevant information. It’s a trio of relevant information, simple device-usage AND readable information (isn’t that what is requested for years???). If the trio is not right, just get rid of the architecture. Users will refuse to use the solution.

Bottomline is that more and more BI organizations are using the WEB 2.0 technologies like AJAX, to make fancy BI applications (presentation / analysis) that work performant on mobile devices. Also the technology of RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications) is becoming hot according to Gartner.

Social networking is becoming basis for knowledge Management

We had a phonelist in the past, which was enhanced with photo’s to recognise the people to become a facebook (DUTCH: Smoelenboek). After the migration to the intranet and again an enhancement with contact, knowledge and experience, it was further developed by some internet companies.

Companies like Hyves, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace, Ning, Plaxo, etc. started to emerge and becoming popular amongst there targeted people. These companies started to add little application to the service of the ” old’ phonelist, like email communication, scheduling, etc. First these applications were not interchangable, but after OpenSocial started with the definition(s) of standards, to make the applications interchangable, the forces started to grow in this specific marketsegment. Oracle, Microsoft and IBM decided to hop on the train as well. Nothing seems to stand in the way of world domination for social networking it seems.

If applications are interchangable, the data was soon to follow it’s ancestor. Google and Facebook are member of the so-called Data Portability Consortium. This group is targeted towards the integration of all data and meeting the request of a USER CENTRIC approach, One Place to Administer All. But as the group starts to facilitate the data interchange, a discussion starts. A discussion about privacy and protection of the personal data. In the Netherlands there’s even a law for that protection.

If the social network applications start to become more and more business oriented, so will the need to stay compliant within the firm. We do not want valuable and delicate information to become public property by employees using social netwerking (applications).

As a Solution Architect Business Information Management this is a nice opportunity, since the data migration and integration can be made less difficult by using “ETL processes”. We move data around for years now, so we know how to extract, transform and load data, and let is become information (or even diamond if used correctly…..)

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