Mobile business intelligence can enhance the decision-making process and provide new sources of data.
This is according to speakers at the Mobile Commerce Executive Forum, in Johannesburg, yesterday.
"Our lives will only become more mobile-centric," said Hywel Moore, MicroStrategy UK sales engineer. In order to accommodate their individual needs, businesses should have the tools to build their own mobile apps, Moore noted.
"We believe that companies will need to develop hundreds of mobile applications: not only BI, but also HR, general management and sales applications," said Stefan Harbron, MicroStrategy professional services director, also speaking at the event. "Apps are needed for every customer-facing process, and for every internal business process."
User-friendly applications enhance the decision-making process by making data and visualisations simple and easy to access, said Moore. "The way the market is going is self-service for the end-user, making it easy for the end-user to format their data into visualisations and act on it. Agile BI is all about self-service for end-users, allowing them to do things alone very quickly, without IT support."
The native functionality of mobile devices can be a useful tool in providing data for analysis. According to MicroStrategy, its Mobile Identity network can provide user identity on a mobile device, by scanning a QR code or creating a one-time, four-digit user code.
This allows users to sign and seal documents, gain access to files or locations, and also provides a "real-time global view of identity activity, activity analysis and anomaly detection", explained Moore. "Location tracking can help us with fraud because we can see if someone has logged on in London, and again in Frankfurt within three minutes.
"There's a lot we can do using the underlying BI platform to drive this forward," Moore continued. "This will drive the uptake of mobile BI."
Alert, MicroStrategy's mobile commerce platform that enables retailers to connect with customers via mobile applications, ties the application to customer loyalty cards. Promotions can then be targeted based on customer purchase history, loyalty status, demographics and social activity. Drawing data from all the users of the application, retailers are able to implement campaign management, purchase analytics, store performance and customer segmentation, said the brand.
For businesses looking to go more mobile, it's vital to first define a mobile strategy in detail, said Izak Bester, MicroStrategy sales engineer, speaking at the same event. "What are the first 10 apps that you would want to build - transaction, business intelligence, workflow?"
Another important factor to take into account is the necessary training, continued Bester. "Who in the organisation has the knowledge to get the apps up and running? Who are the experts you need to involve? Who needs access to training?"
Mobile is such a vital trend to follow, concluded Bester, because it's available all the time, everywhere, to everyone, and has the functionality of features such as GPS and app stores. "We can do anything if we're connected."
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