Mobile Business Intelligence (Mobile BI or Mobile Intelligence) is a system comprising both technical and organizational elements that present historical and/or real-time information to its users for analysis on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets (not laptops), to enable effective decision-making and management support, for the overall purpose of increasing firm performance. (Peters et al., 2016). Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments or associated costs and incomes. Although the concept of mobile computing has been prevalent for over a decade, Mobile BI has shown a momentum/growth only very recently. This change has been partly encouraged by a change from the ‘wired world’ to a wireless world with the advantage of smartphones which has led to a new era of mobile computing, especially in the field of BI. According to the Aberdeen Group, a large number of companies are rapidly undertaking mobile BI owing to a large number of market pressures such as the need for higher efficiency in business processes, improvement in employee productivity (e.g., time spent looking for information), better and faster decision making, better customer service, and delivery of real-time bi-directional data access to make decisions anytime and anywhere. But despite the apparent advantages of mobile information delivery, mobile BI is still in the ‘early adopter’ phase. Some CFOs remain skeptical of the business benefits and with the perceived lack of specific business use cases and tangible ROI, mobile BI adoption is still behind the curve compared with other enterprise mobile applications.
History
Information delivery to mobile devices The predominant method for accessing BI information is using proprietary software or a Web browser on a personal computer to connect to BI applications. These BI applications request data from databases. Starting in the late 1990s, BI systems offered alternatives for receiving data, including email and mobile devices..
Static data push Initially, mobile devices such as pagers and mobile phones received pushed data using a short message service (SMS) or text messages. These applications were designed for specific mobile devices, contained minimal amounts of information, and provided no data interactivity. As a result, the early mobile BI applications were expensive to design and maintain while providing limited informational value, and garnered little interest.
Data access via a mobile browser The mobile browser on a smartphone, a handheld computer integrated with a mobile phone, provided a means to read simple tables of data. The small screen space, immature mobile browsers, and slow data transmission could not provide a satisfactory BI experience. Accessibility and bandwidth may be perceived as issues when it comes to mobile technology, but BI solutions provide advanced functionality to predict and outperform such potential challenges. While Web-based mobile BI solutions provide little to no control over the processing of data in a network, managed BI solutions for mobile devices only utilize the server for specific operations. In addition, local reports are compressed both during transmission and on the device, permitting greater flexibility for storage and receipt of these reports. Within a mobile environment, users capitalize on easy access to information because the mobile application operates within a single authoring environment that permits access to all BI content (respecting existing security) regardless of language or locale. Furthermore, the user will not need to build and maintain a separate mobile BI deployment. In addition, mobile BI requires much less bandwidth for functionality. Mobile BI promises a small report footprint on memory, encryption during transmission as well as on the device, and compressed data storage for offline viewing and use.
Mobile client application In 2002, Research in Motion released the first BlackBerry smartphone optimized for wireless email use. Wireless e-mail proved to be the “killer app” that accelerated the popularity of the smartphone market. By the mid-2000s, Research in Motion's BlackBerry had solidified its hold on the smartphone market with both corporate and governmental organizations. The BlackBerry smartphones eliminated the obstacles to mobile business intelligence. The BlackBerry offered a consistent treatment of data across its many models, provided a much larger screen for viewing data, and allowed user interactivity via the thumbwheel and keyboard. BI vendors re-entered the market with offerings spanning different mobile operating systems (BlackBerry, Windows, Symbian) and data access methods. The two most popular data access options were:
to use the mobile browser to access data, similar to desktop computer, and to create a native application designed specifically for the mobile device. Research in Motion is continuing to lose market share to Apple and Android smartphones. In the first three months of 2011 Google's Android OS gained 7 points of market share. During the same time period RIM's market share collapsed and dropped almost 5 points.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
