Although “information enabled decisions” is a philosophy that has been discussed and promoted widely in the recent times, it has not yet become the mainstream SOP (standard operating protocol). With a big part of the Business Leaders now being mobile and remote, this has become a bigger challenge.
Actionable vs Action Enabled BI
Enter the iPhone a few years ago and it appeared that the mobile workforce could then get access to entities beyond email and calendar that the BlackBerry had made so popular. The Iphone interface allowed for Information and insights to be presented to the field force, better enabling the fieldforce and gained pretty quick braod adoption. But the formfactor was still too small for effective use of information. With the entrance of the ipad that changed completely. Now there was a platform that could allow the mobile workforce to get access to insights without a constrained screen size, available on the go. Given that enterprises are spending a lot of effort in generating and presenting relevent information nuggets / insights, there is a clear push to make these “Actionable” i.e “Actionable Intelligence”. Since these are now available to the field force on their tablets, this becomes “Actionable Intelligence OnTheGo”.
But the added twist to this is what I term as Action Enabled BI or adding the mobility aspect to this makes it Mobile Action Enabled BI (MAEBI I pronounce it MayeeBuy). Here users are presented with not just the “actionable insights” but also the relevant transactional screens that would enable them to make a decision and take an action. All of the top tier BI vendors are already providing a platform / framework to support this.
Although in its infancy today, this will be the way next generation applications will be built i.e. screens natively designed to have both transactional “action” components presented along with BI components. BTW, these BI components will not be static but will be fully interactive. In fact there will be screens designed to dynamically incorporate the right level of actions based on the insights being viewed by the user. The mantra will be “relevant actions presented with the insights”. This will allow our highly mobile workforce to make decisions based on relevant insights and take actions all on one screen, on the go. This opens up an entire new world of possibilities, adding a whole new perspective to how the mobile workforce could operate.
This is a summary of the article that was published on the BeyeNetwork (http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/15304).