The conversations were all fascinating – including the French people talk about their chances during the World Cup. Then you have people like me who were talking about mobility. I clearly need to get a life.
However, I was having what I thought was a really interesting conversation around the notion of mobile business intelligence. Hunh? What the heck is Mobile BI? The person I was talking to had a very detailed and specific view on business intelligence for mobility, with a particular focus on the expense management part of the equation. While I didn’t disagree with his assessment per se, mobile business intelligence strikes me as both more and less than expense management.
Sure, expense management has a reporting component. You can determine how many mobile plans are underutilized…you can also see how many employees are repeatedly abusing their mobile privileges.
Wireless expense management goes well beyond just the dashboard reporting I describe above to offer contract negotiation tools as well as bill reconciliation and other necessary functions. Mobile BI is, in my opinion, substantively different. In one respect, it covers many, if not most aspects of mobility management. It’s almost like mobility management lite.
If you were to create a Venn diagram, I think BI would be sharing common areas with multiple things. For example, part of mobile BI would be around asset and inventory management. It can certainly play into device and service management, as well as security and even connection management.
That said, Mobile BI is no panacea and certainly has its limitations. Visibility into what’s going on doesn’t help you then figure out what to do and how to execute on that plan. Information that comes from a dashboard is vital, there’s no question – but having that information only solves the awareness component of problem resolution.
Another issue that comes up is how should this be packaged and or aggregated? Is this something that can be cross platform without needing “cross platform” tools (meaning custom coding for all the different platforms. How should a service like this be delivered? Behind the firewall, managed service or SaaS?
I’d love to get your reactions on mobile business intelligence.
