I wrote an entry a while back called Take a Look at the Future of BI, You'll Like What You See.  The main point of the entry was that I was frustrated trying to navigate on my tiny little blackberry screen.  Since then, like many others, I have fallen head-over-heels in love with the iPad.  While I have always been intrigued by the concept of mobile BI and Performance management every vendor demonstration (while very cool) left me thinking that only a small percentage of BI users would find the interface useful and most would grow frustrated trying to navigate through the small screens to get to the information they need.

Microstrategy has recently made a big marketing push for their mobile BI offering.  I think they make my point about mobile BI for me quite well.  I watched their video about their their iPhone app.  I found it cool but a bit cumbersome as they started drilling up and down to find pertinent information.  Take a look and see if you agree http://www.microstrategy.com/mobile/iphone/

But that same information delivered on an iPad will be much more intuitive and usable by the average BI user.  Just take a look at this picture from the Microstrategy website showing BI information on a blackberry, iPhone, and iPad.  Personally, I could see using the Blackberry or iPhone to consume a couple of numbers but would be very comfortable using the iPad to dive deeper into analysis and investigation.  So, my opinion is that the iPad will change the face of BI and over the next couple of years.  Mobile BI on tablets will make BI more attractive to a much larger potential user community.  Maybe it will be the game changer we needed to finally make BI pervasive.

While I once doubted the willingness of the business world to adopt the iPad when I see companies like SAP deploy 17,000 iPads  it makes me question my stance on that.  And with new Android-based tablet options  coming to market the  growth of tablets will be prolific which will drive more pervasive adoption of mobile BI and PM over the next couple of years.