QuickForms 3.0: A Business Intelligence Application Framework for Integrating Mobile Forms Data

Abstract

Mobile apps are very popular and widely used to collect data. However, traditional web development tools like .Net and J2EE take a generic approach to such applications that leads to high code complexity and poor quality assurance. At the same time, Business Intelligence (BI) portals and dashboards provide interactive reports that allow one to flexibly explore, analyze, and visualize data. However, they are usually defined independently of the applications which are the source of the data. As a result, complex ETL (Extract, Transfer, and Load data) processes are required to integrate and transform data for reporting. We propose an application framework that flexibly integrates mobile apps and BI dashboards. We implemented three different versions of the framework and conducted case studies using two different health care applications to evaluate the framework. They demonstrated the potential to develop BI applications that integrate mobile forms data with less effort, less complexity, more consistency, and better ease of use. More importantly, the application framework provided the ability to seamlessly integrate data collection and reporting in a single mobile app. The final version of the application framework, QuickForms 3.0, is now published as an open source project, and a growing community of developers are now using the framework to build a wide variety of mobile apps.