Mobile Business Intelligence: Must Have or Nice to Have?

by | May 9, 2013 | Big Data, Business Intelligence (BI)

Mobility in business intelligence has gone from being a nice-to-have option to become an ultimate necessity for many businesses.

In fact; according to the Mobile Marketing Association in Asia, out of the 6.8 billion people on the planet 5.1 billion own a cellphone while only 4.2 billion own a toothbrush. With this paradigm shift comes the transformation of Business Intelligence (BI) to mobile business intelligence (mobile BI) or mobile intelligence.

BI is sometimes defined as the framework that enables organizations of all sizes to make faster, better-informed business decisions. Mobile BI adds to this definition by signifying the importance and involvement of Mobile devices such as; cellphones, tablets etc. into the field of data representation and analysis. Therefore it is safe to say that, mobile BI features play an important role in choosing a business Intelligence tool.

The need for BI mobility however changes with a company’s growth and its ability to adapt to a Business Intelligence solution. In the initial days of Mobile BI, the mobility option was considered to be reserved only for the top level management as; the “mobile” feature was just for the representation or viewing of data and not data entry. Many leading BI solutions today are nonetheless working on ways to incorporate data entry features in their mobile BI software solutions.

With increasing business size and scope, companies are exposed to extremely complicated real-time challenges. In order to combat these obstacles, every level of management has to be equipped with the right tools to instantly react on the changes in data. This instantaneous response may only be possible if BI tools have the capability to be mobile.

Rapid growth in areas such as the cloudin-memory technology, and big data are also compelling BI companies to explore new areas of Mobile BI technology. As the gap between experiencing traditional BI content on a computer and access on a mobile device disappears rapidly— the future success of mobile BI draws closer.

Perhaps, Mobile BI will become a key differentiator between performing and under performing companies in the not too distant future.

Blog Post Contributed by- Priyank Mathur, Marketing Associate, PARIS Technologies

~Image courtesy of pakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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