Emerging Trends In Business Intelligence Mobile Bi

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

OLATUNJI-DAVID Folagbade J,

OMOLOLU Royal-Praise O.,

OBIGBESAN Olumayowa B.

Abstract

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Keywords: Business Intelligence, Performance Management, BI Technologies, BI 2.0, BI 3.0, Pervasive BI, Mobile BI

Introduction

An organization that cannot effectively identify the important information required at all levels will inevitably be forced out of business by competitors who can (Ackoff, 1967). A vital form of information systems (IS) is the Decision Support System (DSS), which can be defined as "systems that support non‐routine decision making with a focus on unique problems that are rapidly changing, and for which the procedure for arriving at a solution may not be fully defined in advanced" (Laudon, 2012) this literally means they are systems that support better decision making at all levels and this is precisely what Business Intelligence is geared towards.

Business intelligence (BI) is a contemporary term, given to the ability of an organization to collect, maintain, and organize knowledge. This produces large amounts of information that can help develop new opportunities. Identifying these opportunities, and implementing an effective strategy, can provide competitive advantage and long‐term stability. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations (Keen, 1980). Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics (Laudon, 2012).

The eventual expectations that drive the deployment of business intelligence in today’s world is the need to offer better decision making support for businesses. The challenge however is that BI isn't just analyst‐driven anymore; it's pervasive, Innovation is coming from nontraditional and emerging vendors. New technologies are coming for information access, analysis and presentation capabilities (Trevino, 1999). There is therefore a need for Innovation to occur with sourcing options in addition to technology. This paper looks to address emerging technologies that are showing up in the scene of Business Intelligence; trends like pervasive BI, mobile BI and BI 2.0.

Pervasive BI is one of those concepts that is intuitively recognized as positive and having a lot of potential. The benefits of pervasive BI extend the benefits of business intelligence to an entire organization. The pace of business is rapidly accelerating, so being knowledgeable about one’s today business is more important than ever. Keeping everyone in the organization informed is what pervasive BI is all about — and it will impact performance, understanding, and loyalty. For the vast majority of organizations, BI solutions have yet to become fully pervasive — BI still has a ways to go before it is pervasive. Accounting for this knowledge‐gap is the fact that modern business intelligence is only starting to mature and realize its full potential, and this paper will look to discuss much of this referred potential.

In a world that is increasingly going mobile and instantaneous, it would be surprising if the Business arena would not take a cue from it. Recent emerging trends indicate that work‐place analytical capabilities are being deployed via mobile devices to improve job performance, decision making and Just-In-Time (JIT) decisions. This is possible as the frontiers of social networking tools and the ever increasing processing power and miniaturization of mobile devices are being extended to bring about limitless opportunities to be harnessed (Ramakrishna, 2008). Some of the possibilities are due to new technologies that have changed the way BI (Business Intelligence) operates which include (CEP) Complex Events Processing and In‐Memory Analysis. These allow for Predictive Analytics and Real Time Analytics which are going to be instrumental to next‐generation Business Intelligence (Bedell, 2011). Most of all, as expectation time for delivery of results keep shrinking; these mobile BI tools will keep rising to the occasion, by increasing efficiency and best of all, being available on the fly (Hatch, 2008).

This field of research has been chosen over others because of the interests of both student researchers in finding key determinants in identifying the role of proper data and knowledge management in establishing sustainable competitive advantage in business.

BI 2.0

BI is an essential utility that enables businesses gain competitive advantage from analyzing data available to the organization. While business intelligence is still regarded as a technology that is not new, its use has increased steadily over time, with an average 4% growth rate in the BI market since the beginning of the recession of 2008 (Trujilo, 2011).

While traditional technologies for supporting BI such as data warehousing, OLAP, data mining, etc. query data from the inside of the organization, novel trends of BI (BI 2.0) that focus on the analysis of external data have emerged. The outcome of having a wider data pool is that the analysis is more comprehensive, and provides better platform and support for decision making. For example, a retail company that would typically focus its BI strategies internally, can now have access to prices of competitors, and can also have information to how the customers receive their products; this will in turn affect their strategy for the release of another product.

The internet has been the driving force for data and information dispersion over the last 10 years and will continue to be for a long time. One important thing to note is that the new trend of BI 2.0 is bidirectional: because BI applications receive and process data from the web, BI applications are starting to evolve to become pervasively web driven technologies. (See section <pervasive section>). Some of the BI driven applications today are Social Networks, Cloud Computing, Interactive WebApps, SaaS (Software as a Service), Semantic Web Search, Word Clouds, Wiki’s, Collaborative Networks, e.t.c.

Fig: BI 2.0 Architecture (Source: Trujilo, 2011).

BI 2.0 Basic Concepts

Like any technology in use today, there are key concepts that essentially define and differentiate BI 2.0 from other data mining and processing activities.

Real-time analysis: BI 2.0 has to focus on data analysis that is on-line and real time. Because of the new found volatile nature of data, BI 2.0 has to be super flexible and super reactive in nature to process and analyze data.

Intuitive and interactive analysis: Unlike traditional data processing that typically involves homogenous data types and 1-directional analysis, BI 2.0 supports interactive analysis that acts based on a user’s preference, and that can be altered and re-analyzed if certain variables are changed.

Collaboration between decision-makers: A key concept in BI 2.0 is the collaboration that should exist between decision-makers in the manipulation of analyzed data.

Linking and enriching data: The concept of Business Intelligence itself is that of the linking of different data to present better information for decision making, and BI 2.0 takes it a notch higher by enriching this data to be more self-explanatory and therefore increases the utility of the information eventually provided.

APPLICATION OF BI 2.0

Real-Time Information

As a major application of BI 2.0, the importance of up-to-date information is crucial (Thiele et al.). Analyzed information as explained earlier needs to stay fresh so as to stay relevant; for example, an airliner needs to know they availability of seats on a flight at any given time to be able to plan supplements for their passengers, route availability, etc.

Software as a Service

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a model of distributing software where applications are normally hosted by a service provider or vendor and then made available to customers through a network, most common of which is the Internet(McHall, 2011). This means that software is consumed as a remote service (Essaidi et al). BI 2.0 is applied through the use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Service Oriented Architecture Protocol (SOAP) for platform interoperability.

Because of the mainly internet based dependency of SaaS, and the substantially higher quantity of data available for analysis, it has caused a shift in modus operandum of a lot of BI systems to become BI as a Service.

Cloud Computing

As a concept related to BI 2.0, cloud computing integrates several heterogeneous elements into a network and then makes these elements available through a homogeneous platform for remote users (Armbrust et al., 2009). Cloud computing can in some way be associated as an umbrella which Software as a Service (SaaS) falls under, because typically the services which Cloud Computing offer are made available as SaaS. Cloud Computing also exhibits the real time and responsive characteristics that BI 2.0 applications have, as it supports the addition of new elements at any time, be it data or service.

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Emerging trends in Business Intelligence: Mobile BI

Introduction

With the advancement of technology we can run various BI solutions on many different mobile devices. This became possible some 2-3 years ago with the emergence of mobile broadband and new and powerful hardware platforms such as iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile/Phone and Blackberry. Over the past several years’ solution providers have placed a lot of effort into developing interactive mobile applications that can be used by decision makers on the road.  Although it has been a slow road to broad adoption, mobile BI is finally starting to make inroads into the general business intelligence marketplace.Today, people are using mobile phones to track crop prices in Kenya and manage micropayments in the Philippines. They are tapping into these devices to handle healthcare information in Nicaragua and oversee bakery orders in Nigeria. In fact, with an estimated three billion- plus mobile phones in use worldwide and approximately 80% of the world’s population within the reach of a cell tower, almost no corner of the globe remains untouched. (Greengard 2008)

Mobile Business Intelligence represents only a single trend within business intelligence and it is becoming a leading trend within the BI market. Within mobile BI, however, many trends are emerging that affect overall adoption and use. With technology advancements and widespread adoption of Androids, iPhones, tablets and iPads, vendors are able to provide BI offerings that allow companies to provide enhanced analytics and information access.

Beginning of Mobile BI

Generally, the expansion of business intelligence for mobile use can be broken out into two separate categories: the ability to view and distribute information and the ability to interact within a business intelligence application.  These also relate directly to mobile BI use when it first became available and the expanded offerings that are being announced through the course of this year.

About three years ago 2009 to be more specific, BI vendors started announcing the availability of BI for mobile devices.  The actual extent of use and availability depended upon the screen real estate and the supported devices.  In general, solutions available entailed email access to charts and graphs scaled down to fit a typical blackberry screen with the ability to scroll through information.  The benefits of this new delivery were that people could share information with colleagues and transport valuable analyses conveniently. 

Unfortunately, limited functionality and usability meant that the actual interoperability of mobile BI was lacking.  End users, in some cases, could change the way they viewed data, but in very few cases were they able to do much more or edit the information they were viewing.  In addition, because of the limited user interface, not much beyond a singular graph or report could be compared or viewed at a time. 

Although the ability to view BI tools via a mobile device added to the value of an organization’s overall applications, the reality is that this type of access to information was limiting.  Despite the advances in technology and the ability to email a new report or analytical insight to a colleague’s mobile device, little value regarding the application of BI through mobile existed.

The evolution of offerings

The expansion of mobile BI offerings and the types of applications developed can be directly related to technological advancements and the way people use and interact with their mobile devices.  For instance, when mobile solutions were first offered, many were focused on providing access to PDFs through blackberries.  The goal was to let end users access reports irrespective of their location.  For business travelers, this made sense as information became easier to access no matter where a person was located.  However, because the full benefits of BI were impossible to realize – basically the ability to interact with valuable business information and gain additional insights – the actual use case of mobile BI was light.

As both mobile technologies matured and BI usage broadened, the possibility to look at different ways of deploying and interacting with BI became a reality.  Although many organizations are still stuck on traditional BI applications with data warehousing, OLAP and interactive reporting, business intelligence is slowly shifting away from a focus on strong BI infrastructures and super-user access.  The goal of BI is moving towards what its main purpose has always been – providing business users with deeper insights into business and helping them make the right decisions.  In addition, the increasing use of social media leads to the demand for higher levels of interoperability and greater ease of use.  Based on these factors alone, mobile BI is now able to provide organizations with the necessary business benefits by giving instant access to information in the format and through the media desired, while providing one more way for end users to interact with their data.

Because of the popularity of iPhones and the ease of use of and interactivity of iPhone applications, the ability to offer BI applications is relatively simple in terms of people adding one more application to the long line of solutions they use.  Consequently, many vendors have developed mobile offerings to be deployed on the iPhone and other smartphones.  As people start to use phones more broadly, business and pleasure also starts to overlap.  However, even with the expansion of use, mobile BI specifically hasn’t taken off or enjoyed wide-scale adoption.

Trends of Mobile BI

With a constant connection to people, the Internet and entertainment, business applications on mobile devices were a natural progression.  Blackberries, smartphones and iPhones have made the ability to bring work and play everywhere.  People can no longer afford to wait to get back to the office to access the information required to do their jobs.  Until recently, this information and interaction with technology came in the form of carrying a notebook computer or using a blackberry for email, calendar and simple task functions.  Now that people can access and edit documents through their phones – and with the easy user interfaces offered through the iPhone – the use of mobile devices for business is becoming second nature. 

This is the same when looking at the use of business intelligence applications.  As the role of mobile has increased in general and as BI becomes more broadly applied and valued, the two converge to enable organizations to access the information they require when they need it (and to share that information through collaboration).  Consequently, the role of mobile BI is becoming more important within the overall function of BI as a whole. 

Applications of mobile BI

The ability to access the right information at the right time is always beneficial.  What mobile BI can offer a company is the ability to provide employees who are on the road with timely and accurate access to analytics.  In some cases this might include providing executives with information required to prepare for meetings, or giving sales representatives information they need before visiting clients or suppliers.  Overall, the goal is to make information access easier without requiring a laptop, access to a desktop, or printing out static reports.  In addition, because collaboration and other communication tools are now built in to BI, end users can communicate with one another in real time through texting, chat or email - to discuss opportunities or concerns based on insights gained through information access and daily interactions.

Better Sales Analysis and Visibility

Aside from overall use, trends exist within applications of mobile BI. Sales analysis has always been at the forefront of BI adoption. In traditional or "software as a service" SaaS-based offerings, sales analytics remains a key way by which businesses identify the success or failure of their performance. This provides the basis for more in-depth analysis in relation to customers, suppliers, product movement, and industry trends. Consequently, the new ability of sales managers and others involved in partner or supply chain management to bring BI with them means they no longer need to download reports or refer to out-of-date data. This results in more opportunities in relation to performance and business relationships. Even though this may have existed in the form of blackberries and the like, the amount of interaction and full-scale functionality was not previously available.

Looking ahead

The promise of information access in the hands of decision makers without restrictions is appealing.  Organizations using business intelligence effectively within their companies can always choose to move beyond traditional BI use and add mobile BI to their overall usage with relative ease.  The only real barrier to entry is whether BI users are open to changing and expanding the way they interact with their business applications.

The real adoption of mobile BI applications

Even though mobile BI has seen limited adoption, for organizations that choose to take advantage of mobile analytics, the ability to access business intelligence irrespective of geographic location can be very beneficial to business performance and data visibility.   People are becoming less attached to physical offices due to the increase in telecommuting, virtual businesses and e-commerce, travel, client engagements, supply chain management, and the like.  Consequently, people are also becoming less tied to traditional means of business management and are adopting more interactive ways of doing business.  Collaboration and social networking have become commonplace in some organizations and people are starting to bridge the gap between the way they interact with technology inside and outside of the office.  As this trend grows, more companies will start to use applications that support collaboration and communication across channels, geographic locations and departments.

Even with the benefits of mobile access to information, the reality is that due to the small screen real estate of mobile phones, there will always be limitations in relation to how much can be viewed or interacted with at once. People’s preferences will dictate whether mobile BI actually gains wide adoption or whether the development of these applications simply addresses the needs of internal competition among vendors.

Also, as more people become comfortable with newer technologies, the role of business applications and their expansion will become seamless.  End users will require the ability to manage the customer irrespective of location.  A good example is Apple and the fact that within their physical stores they bring checkout to the customer with the option of a paperless transaction.  These types of customer initiatives will continue to become more prevalent and provide a good example of how businesses are taking advantage of mobile technologies to expand their reach and enhance customer experience.  Tying this to BI means that organizations will provide the same conveniences to their employees giving them the flexibility to access the right information at the right time within the right place – whether the right place means on a desktop, laptop or mobile device.

Mobile as an analytics vessel

Apple’s example also provides a good introduction into the secondary way companies are taking advantage of mobile technologies and leveraging BI.  Although not considered within the category of mobile BI, the fact remains that many organizations are tracking their customers by collecting GPS and geospatial data to identify demographics or to make special offers based on location or store proximity.  Information collected is also applied to analytics to identify the success of marketing campaigns or to identify consumer-buying habits.  Overall, the use of BI is expansive when looking at how businesses leverage mobile-related data and apply that data to analytics, whether from within companies using BI applications on mobile devices or by using mobile information as the input for business intelligence processes. 

How Organizations Are Using Mobile BI

Within the last year or so, i.e. 2011, solution providers for example System, Applications, Products popularly known as SAP have announced mobile BI solutions.  These solutions differ from their predecessors in two key ways: 1) mobile BI includes interaction with BI applications and functionality, and 2) attractive user interfaces make the use of BI possible and much easier.

Current mobile BI offerings are applications that include full interactivity within the mobile application in order to perform BI functions.  Not only can users view and share information but they can interact with and analyze data, creating reports and charts as needed.  With an increasing expectation that employees will take their work with them, the ability to analyze information anywhere and gain insights into what is happening within the organization - and make decisions on the fly while at offsite meetings or with clients - becomes an essential job function.  The importance of instant communication and access to data cannot be underestimated.  Data collected from mobile devices and transferred back to the organization can be pushed directly into business intelligence solutions to provide right-time analysis capabilities and up-to-date information from employees in the field.

In addition to mobile BI now acting as a full BI application on the go, devices such as iPhones make interaction easy.  Sleek interfaces enable BI use in a way that was not possible in previous iterations.  New mobile devices are designed for Internet use and social media applications making the use of mobile BI easier. 

Challenges

Since the successful launch of the Apple iPad a year ago, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of companies seeking to deploy business intelligence on mobile devices. Certainly, the marriage between the iPad and BI is a strong one: the iPad (or tablets in general) is designed for consuming information and BI is designed to deliver it.

But there are all kinds of thorny issues involved in deploying BI--or any corporate application for that matter--on a mobile platform. The most widely discussed are security, selecting a mobile platform, designing for the mobile form factor, identifying appropriate mobile use cases, and selecting an application architecture (i.e. browser-based versus device-specific). These all represent significant challenges. But one issued that hasn't been discussed much yet is whether an organization should deploy corporate mobile applications on personal or company-issued devices.

Personal or Corporate?

This is a tricky issue. Since many employees already have an iPad or other mobile device, it would be difficult to ask them to carry a second one just for business. Since these are consumer gadgets, it's inevitable that organizations are going to have to accommodate the mobile devices that employees already own. But how do you secure and support personal devices that contain a mix of corporate and personal applications and run on different platforms and versions?

The IT department is used to purchasing, configuring, securing, and maintaining computers for employees. Mobile technology undermines this process and threatens IT administrators, whose job is to maintain a stable, secure, error-free compute environment. How can they do that when they don't own or control the devices?

It's clear that the IT department is going to have to adapt. They'll need to purchase corporate devices to support development and testing and give devices to employees who don't own them already. But they'll also need install corporate applications on devices which employees already own. But how are they going to do that? Send them to iTunes or another app store? (Do you really want a corporate application on a consumer-shopping site where people can download the application and uncompile it?) Require them to bring the device to an IT administrator who will physically install the mobile application and requisite security software and test to ensure everything works? Or have users install the software over the wire from a corporate mobile application server?

Lost or Stolen

But these are small hurdles. The biggest issue is non-technical. What happens when a user loses a personal device with a corporate application installed on it?

If your mobile application is browser based, you only have to worry about data cached on the device, which is there to optimize performance. Ideally, your security software automatically deletes the cache every hour or so, which minimizes (but doesn't eliminate) the risk. If you've deployed a native mobile application in which data resides on the device, you'll not only need to clear the cache, but wipe the hard drive as well, which your security software can perform remotely. (Of course, this only works if the device is turned on and connected to the network. Sophisticated thieves will hijack the data without connecting to a network.) In all likelihood, you'll need to apply all these strategies to secure sensitive corporate information.

The Future of Mobile BI

The rate of application development and the ability for companies to integrate these offerings into their overall BI platforms has been partially dependent on the technology available to support these functions.  Blackberries were the first wave, with iPhone interactivity and ease of use within mobile phone use being the push towards full interactive BI access. 

Even with all of the availability of mobile solutions and the hype surrounding being able to take analytics "on the road," the actual adoption rates and popularity of this type of BI are debatable.  With organizations still stuck on traditional data warehousing and reporting solutions (that may not be giving them the full picture of what is happening within their companies or the complete value of BI), the leap to mobile BI can seem astronomical.  In addition, the value of mobile BI provided to these types of organizations can be elusive as their current internal BI solutions may fall short.

The current use of mobile BI and its adoption within organizations is still very young.  Although full BI solutions exist that can be deployed on mobile devices, the actual use of this technology is in its infancy.  Solution providers will still announce new offerings into the next couple of years to catch up to competitors that are trying to meet the needs of their customers who are early adopters. This means that, not only will the availability of mobile BI increase, but its interactivity will as well.  The development of access to BI reports and charts will not be enough to satisfy users.  Solutions will require the ability to pull data from multiple sources, analyze and interact with the data, as well as write data back to the appropriate data stores.

Because social media is shaping the way people and organizations interact with each other and outside entities, BI applications must mimic these uses to maintain and increase the value they provide to organizations.  One way this is done is through mobile BI.  Mobile business intelligence applications enable organizations and decision makers to share information regularly, no matter the physical location, and interact in a way that is conducive to social networking.  As solutions and use matures, mobile BI will become an extension of an organization’s current BI use.