Taking advantage of mobile devices with decision management

Lots of articles talk about the need to provide BI and analysis on mobile devices. And lots of enterprise applications want to “mobilize” themselves. But I don’t see it. I don’t think employees want to do BI on a smartphone or even data mining on an iPad. Nor do they just want to enter data using it. They want their smartphone to be a partner in their day to day work, an intelligent assistant perhaps. This is different from how a consumer views their smartphone only in terms of what it means for companies. When the person holding the phone works for you rather than being a customer you need to make the phone do different things. The good news is that the new generation of smart devices makes this kind of intelligent device practical – it just needs companies to think about decision management as well as mobile devices.

One of the key aspects of decision management is a focus on taking action using insight gained from data – not just showing someone the data (BI) or just letting them create or update it (enterprise apps). Identifying the decisions that drive the behavior of your employees is crucial. If the mobile employee is a claims agent then the decisions …
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