James Taylor's Decision Management

I was asked a question about analytics on mobile devices today and it occurs to me that I don't see weary road warriors wanting to do "traditional" BI on a smartphone or other mobile devices. Some new decision management functions are needed to empower a smart phone platform.

One of the the differences between BI and decision management is the focus on taking action using insight gained from data rather than showing someone the data and helping them gain some insight. This means applications that use the information the phone has (position), insight from the data the company has (fraud likelihood, wait times) to take an action (dispatch the person with the phone to a particular place, tell them to do or not do something). I don't see traditional BI vendors having much to offer here - the whole reporting/OLAP infrastructure they have developed is predicated on knowledge workers doing analysis. If you want to take advantage of mobile devices you need to think about automating decisions for the person holding the device. For instance:

• Use mobile phones held by maintenance engineers to track their location and then use analytics to predict which pieces of equipment are most likely to fail soon and rules to assign the nearest, qualified engineer before sending the directions on where to go to the engineers phone.
  Don't show them reliability graphs or travel times, tell them where to go to make best use of their time
• Use the mobile phone of a real estate appraiser to find out which risk zones a property is in and what the predicted difference is between a house inside and outside that risk zone
  Don't show them a picture of the risk zones
• Use a doctor's mobile phone to route them to the most useful hospital during an emergency based on predictions of patient load, the hospitals they know and their specialties
  Don't show them graphs of wait times and pie charts of specialties needed
• Use a customer's mobile phone to make them an offer at a store that is nearby having predicted that they are likely to buy it, checked that is in stock there and estimated that they are more likely to respond in person than to an email promotion to the website

And so on. Automate decisions and use mobile devices to provide context for those decisions and to deliver decisions to people out and about. Don't send them reports. Please.