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BI Has Left the Building

Data, BI and Value, Let's Get Real

Mobile business intelligence (BI) was a long time coming, but it's finally here and people are using it. Although it has been around for a long time in the form of alerts and emails, it was fairly crude. Information flowed in one direction - to the mobile user - and there was little interactivity. The major BI vendors now offer more user-friendly mobile applications that are more content rich, provide real-time - rather than batch-driven - data and allow users to drill down, across, change views and interact with data. Smart CFOs and CIOs should consider making it available to employees as a way to improve productivity, extend BI adoption and improve operational efficiencies.

I know I am always beating the drum about breadth of adoption; but it really is important. The more people who use your BI application; the more benefits they get from the deployment, and the easier it is for you to tell your boss that it was an effective investment. Mobile BI should be in your BI toolkit as a way to broaden adoption and benefits.

Your sales force is already checking in on weather.com during downtime on the road. They should be able to get vital data for sales calls just as easily.

Mobile BI has another advantage because it makes BI participation easier. Most BI deployments falter for two reasons: people don't participate, which kills the ROI, and people don't participate in data sharing, which kills the quality of the data in the cubes. Making BI mobile means that mobile employees who resist adoption - especially people who are data protective, such as salespeople - have one less reason to resist adoption and data sharing.

Mobile BI is more than just another cool application to put on your Treo or Blackberry. It really is one of those tools that brings value to an organization, because it helps:

  • Mobile workers - who can now access more data and, depending on the vendor, more real-time data from their home, mobile office or car.
  • Salespeople - who can access BI from their car before a call and instantly get a full picture of the customer relationship. They can also check in with sales data of different types. A sales manager who is on the road may want to view his regional sales when he is near quarter end. If numbers are good, he can tell his salespeople to be a little less aggressive on price as the quarter winds down.
  • Administrative workers - Many are the administrative workers who email reports to data-addicted senior managers who are always looking for the latest statistics on sales or operations.
  • Senior managers - who access this data from their PDA allow their support staff to spend time on more value-added tasks.

Here are some real world applications that people are already achieving:

  • Operational staff at a major gasoline retailer use mobile BI to more rapidly find out which stations have broken pumps. Fixing pumps faster means fewer frustrated customers drive to a rival gas station and revenue per pump goes up.
  • Managers of field employees at sites such as oil rigs, airport gates and retail outlets have richer and more real-time data with which to give assignments to their staff. This increases staff utilization, reduces the need to pad staffing levels and cuts payroll costs.
  • Service agents in the field, who make sure your customers are happy with your products, can use mobile BI to get information about a customer's relationships, purchasing habits, preferences and complaints in order to make the most of a site visit.

Everyone's Doing It

Here are a few of the vendors offering mobile BI:

  • Cognos 8 Go! Mobile accesses Cognos 8 BI and reaches to your on-premise Cognos deployment. Since it is not a separate application or duplication of the on-premise environment, it does not require a separate deployment. Features, functionality and data interactivity are identical to the on-premise reports, dashboards and scorecards.
  • Business Objects has a similar SOA-based mobile application that has a two-way interaction with your on-premise installation so that users can drill down, across, query and change data.
  • iDashboards is generally an on-premise, non-mobile solution, but it has a business activity monitoring (BAM) module that has threshold and KPI-driven alerts that can be received via email or on a PDA. The beauty is that iDashboard's application connects directly to the data source and requires no middle layer for storing data, which means you can skip all the work on databases, data marts and data warehouses.
  • Information Builders WebFOCUS Active Reports are compatible with all mobile platforms and enable employees to filter, launch graph windows, manipulate reports in various sort orders and filter data by different criteria.

In the end it's not just about being able to access BI in your car. It's about spending more time on higher-order tasks. With mobile BI, salespeople spend less time driving back to the office to research their accounts and less time on the phone with administrative tasks. Employees in the field can be deployed faster, more thoughtfully and with less interaction with bosses over phone, fax or email. It's also about adoption and data. When BI is easier and more accessible, more people use it and provide data.


David O'Connell contributes to Nucleus Research's industry-leading body of research by performing interviews, writing research reports and building ROI tools. O'Connell follows a number of sectors, including integration, collaboration, business intelligence and workforce management. As a former commercial banker, O'Connell is particularly skilled in evaluating how solutions impact the roles of the CFO, controller and treasurer, and has been writing and presenting technology-oriented business cases for more than 10 years. He is the author of numerous ROI reports, evaluation reports, tools and case studies. You can reach him at doconnell@nucleusresearch.com.  

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