BI Answer Man, Hugo Toledo
With over 15 years of experience leading Business Intelligence teams, Chateaux’s BI Answer Man, Hugo Toledo, has seen many significant technology advancements affect the way business is conducted. Mobile BI is no exception, in fact, it may be the most revolutionary change in the field thus far.
1) How will mobile business intelligence change the way business is done in the future?
Mobile BI is no longer just about enabling superior communications and accessing static information: it’s about being able to interact with the information. Mobile BI allows for real-time answers and decision making beyond the confines of an office–it’s all about speed, flexibility, and efficiency.
One clear result of mobile BI is an increase in the rate of information transferred. More data is moved and more moves take place within a given period of time. Furthermore, mobile data also includes one highly-variable metadata element: location. Location is available from non-mobile devices; however, as a mobile device changes its position, much more information is also available through vicinity details. This is what makes “Checking In” so valuable to many.
This increase in data rate transfer is concomitant with an abundance of data. People and organizations evolve to handle the processing of data, so this surge may concern those not yet ready to handle such large volumes without personnel, training, and tools. Our recommendation? Take a breath: consider what is important and discard the rest. Do not attempt to come up with processes on the fly to handle new scenarios because you don’t know the unintended consequences. While mobile is new to many, at Chateaux we were working on mobile technology since the late 1990s, helping Oracle and Research in Motion determine just how to make sense of the then-more-disparate bandwidth capabilities (i.e., 14.4Kb wireless and 10Mb on LANs). We’ve continued to help clients assess their mix of investments as they plan to deploy and secure RF technologies ranging from RFID and BlueTooth to WiFi and even which way to bet on the 4G network options in play including WiMAX and LTE.
2) What aspects of business, if any, will not change?
Asset management is one area that may not change because of mobile BI. The issue that large enterprises have to deal with is how to determine the cost/benefit of providing devices to better control use versus locking out potentially hundreds of willing participants providing their own devices, be they iPads, iPhones, Android devices and the like. Security is a big concern but not a new one for large enterprises, and many companies cannot afford to risk this by allowing employees to use their personal mobile devices at work.
3) What industries do you predict will and/or will not be affected?
Mobile business intelligence has taken off in the retail industry, predominantly with point-of-sale technologies. Here’s an example of where we’ve already seen this: last holiday season large shopping malls were able to deploy more kiosks, which throw off more money up front due to cheaper mobile technology. The way consumers make purchases will be greatly affected by mobile business intelligence. With applications like Square, for iOS and Androids, customers can make purchases with their smartphones, and business can use the card reader to accept credit card payments. The Square dongles on iOS-based devices alone make it easy for malls to grab more of the “dumb” money that would typically have been spent online.
An area that we have yet to see embrace mobile technology, outside of the plant, is in businesses with larger, more complex sales. For example, car dealerships have very high touch showrooms, but they continue to rely less on customer self-service, for which mobile technology is particularly well suited, and more on the trained sales team.
