Benefits of Mobile Business Intelligence (Part One
Respondents to Howard Dresner’s updated 2011 Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study indicated that they intended to increase the number of personnel with access to Mobile Business Intelligence (BI). And, reflective of the transition to enterprise mobility, 70% of respondents said that 25% or more of current users would receive analytics exclusively on a mobile device by 2013.
“We are in the midst of a profound shift, a paradigm shift, in favor of Mobile Business Intelligence, and things will never fundamentally be the same again,” said Dresner, report author, former Gartner Research Fellow and President and Founder of Dresner Advisory Services at the report’s official launch earlier this year.
“The majority of [representatives of] industries [that participated in the survey] found Mobile Business Intelligence critically important or very important.”
So, we know that interest in, and uptake of, Mobile BI is growing rapidly. But what are the benefits?
Access to real-time information from mobile devices has many notable benefits, including:
- Improved knowledge-sharing to support organizational collaboration and cohesion
- Increased workforce productivity and organization-wide efficiency by reducing time-to-information and therefore time-to-decision processes
- The ability to make better-informed decisions anywhere
- Increased flexibility and adaptability to help outmaneuver competitors and act on marketplace opportunities
- The ability to act swiftly to mitigate risk and emerging crises
- Increased customer satisfaction and enhanced reputation through timely and accurate decision-making
Fine – you’ve caught us. Many of these benefits can also be equally applied to implementing a standard BI solution. So what are the most common benefits specifically sought from a Mobile BI rollout? The top three benefits sought are:
1. Competitive advantage
Organizations are looking to be more responsive and flexible to stay ahead of the competition. Access to real-time data increases the opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell, capitalize and manage emergent opportunities in a timely manner, and respond dynamically to changing market conditions.
2. Increased productivity of the workforce
With real-time access to data, the potential to improve operational efficiencies are dramatically increased. The ability to speed-up the decision-making process, by extending critical information out to decision-makers in the field, is a major benefit of Mobile BI. Delivery of the right data, at the right time, can significantly improve productivity by reducing the time wasted searching for information.
3. Raising the level of profitability through improved customer satisfaction
Delivering Mobile BI to the field will improve customer service and increase customer satisfaction by empowering workers to make faster and more accurate decisions. Access to timely information, particularly for field and sales staff, will help deliver better and quicker results to customers, improving their experience and saving them time, which will lead to lasting improvements in customer satisfaction levels. Through exception reporting, mobile workers can be quickly alerted to important or harmful events before they affect customer relationships, and can proactively capitalize on emerging opportunities without delay.
What the research says…
Keep an eye out for the second half of this investigation into the benefits of Mobile BI – Benefits of Mobile Business Intelligence (Part Two) –to find out what independent analyst research suggests are the key benefits of Mobile BI.