Business intelligence (BI) is used by enterprises to give them an edge over their competitors and many companies are turning to BI tools on mobiles in order to analyse trends on the move.

While some companies are still experimenting, a few, who like to be on the cutting-edge of technology, are already in a higher stage of usage. One such company is Allergan, which is already in the third generation of its BI usage.

Mr K.P. Rajan, Director of Operations, Information Services and Projects, Allergan, told Business Line, “We have a BI solution on SAP and our own sales and supply chain management system. We have used BI on mobiles before and right now, we have a solution that runs on the smart phone.”

For decision making

Mr Bhavish Sood, Research Director at Gartner, said that mobility solutions on BI can be used for faster decision making.

“For instance, if you are in the cargo business, you can use BI in real time to check fleets, perform route optimisation, and manage logistics. While analytics are used for optimisation, you can track the status with the help of mobility tools.”

A recent survey by Gartner said that the market for BI software in India is forecast to reach revenue of $65.4 million in 2011, up 15.7 per cent over 2010.

Worldwide, BI software market revenue is forecast to grow 9.7 per cent to reach $10.8 billion in 2011.

Mr Sood said that BI on mobiles is yet to catch on, and CIOs that we spoke to confirmed this.

Mr Harnath Babu, Head - IT, Star Union Dai-ichi Life, said, “In early 2010, we started using BI in the organisation. Now, we plan to move to the next level, namely mobiles and tablets.”

Mr Babu said that the project will start very soon and by the end of this year, senior executives would be able to access information on the move. “By mid-2012, we will have a good number of dashboards on tablets,” he said.

Mr Hitesh Arora, Director - IT, Max New York Life, said, “We have BI on data warehousing and our vision is that we should have BI dashboards on mobiles too. Right now, I have a demo BI solution running on my mobile and we will implement it by year end.”

Requirements

Mr Arora said that his company was in the phase of gathering requirements from users and was also parallelly evaluation players.

"We will have a dynamic dashboard of BI over the years, which will be used by our sales force and senior management, including the CEO," he said.

Once these two CIOs and others like them implement BI on the mobile, what would they expect to see? Mr Rajan said that there are two kinds of BI solutions - one of them is used by the management, typically the head office, to look at the company's performance, and can be desktop-based.

Key role

“For a large pharmaceutical company like ours, we also need ground market intelligence and here, BI on mobiles plays a key role." Mr Rajan said that mobile BI is used by his organisation to check out how competitors' products are doing and to analyse the prescription habits of doctors. “I feel that this is more important. Has one of our people missed out on key doctors? If so, why? What is the feedback on our products? Is it positive or negative? For such areas, mobile BI is important,” he said.

Mr Rajan said that, thanks to mobile BI, in his organisation, information flow has become much faster. "If you look at a progression from data to information to knowledge and finally to wisdom, well, thanks to mobile BI, I would say that we are reaching wisdom," he said.

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