More importance now placed on Mobile Business Intelligence

Organizations are placing increasing importance on Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) as a delivery mechanism for corporate data assets according to the Dresner Advisory Services’ (DAS) latest Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study.

The report, compiled from almost 200 respondents in October 2011, revealed a sharp increase in the importance organizations place on Mobile BI.

Sixty-eight percent of survey participants listed Mobile BI as ‘critical’ or ‘very important’, compared to 52 percent from the original 2010 study. The number of respondents listing Mobile BI as ‘unimportant’ dropped from 11 to two percent over the same period. Seventy-five percent of respondents to the October 2011 version stated that 21 – 81 percent of BI users within their organization will consume reporting and analytics exclusively via mobile devices by 2013.

Importance of Mobile BI by organization size

The DAS report indicates that smaller (1- 100 employees) and larger organizations (over 5000 employees) place the most importance on Mobile BI than midsized enterprises.

*The scale on the y-axis represents the averaged respondent responses to the question “how important is Mobile BI”, from 4 (“critical”) to 1 (“not important”).

Report author, former Gartner Research Fellow and President and Founder of DAS, Howard Dresner, suggests that this trend is due to the agility of smaller organizations (their ability to quickly implement and incorporate new business technologies) and the resource capacity of larger organizations to invest in emergent technologies.

Interestingly, a single group, the smallest organizations are by far the most motivated Mobile BI adopters, both in terms of current and planned investment.

Today, over 20 percent of respondents from smaller organizations said that they enjoyed an 81 percent or greater Mobile BI penetration rate, with almost 40 percent expecting an 81 percent or higher Mobile BI penetration rate within 36 months.

Dresner on the future of Mobile BI

Dresner stated in the report that he expects Mobile BI to revolutionize the way people use and consume business information.

“This latest findings report shows strong evidence that Mobile BI is taking hold – broadly,” said Dresner. “We believe that we’re in the midst of a profound shift toward Mobile BI (and mobile computing). We believe this paradigm shift will affect everyone and have as much impact as the Internet did, over time.

“The impact of Mobile BI… will change the way that we work, our ability to respond more quickly and to align towards common purpose. This notion of pervasiveness has always been the mission of BI, which may now finally be realized with the catalyst of mobile computing.”

Survey participants ranked BI as the third most in-demand enterprise mobile application – out of 11 options – after email and personal information management systems (calendar, etc).