California Management Review
California Management Review is a premier academic management journal published at UC Berkeley
by Jocelyn Shieh
Cloud technology and business intelligence (BI), conceived and built separately, dovetail together to provide businesses with the kind of competitive real-time advantages that separate winners from losers in the business world. Mobile analytics is enabled by the seamless pairing of cloud and BI that ensure security across all levels and devices, giving analysts and managers greater transparency, real-time updates, and more comprehensive views of data in the business. Mobile analytics’ main value proposition rests upon three key game changers: Communication, Operation, and Collaboration.
Communication
Mobile analytics enable on-the-go information updates and revisions that free analyst teams from bulky IT-secured and approved computers, allowing teams to quickly edit dashboards and reports using tablets and even smartphones.The accessibility of analytics on mobile devices allows teams to follow tangents in strategy in real-time, rather than giving competition time to respond. This way, teams can communicate with each other easily, update one another with new information when available, and respond with dashboards that follow new decisions and strategies immediately, rather than next day.
Operation
Real-time mobile analytics give businesses the flexibility to extend reporting from a granular level to low-level operational nodes: warehouses, direct B2C stores, etc. With analytics and reporting available from a mobile device, managers avoid the time lag of reports coming from corporate on a weekly basis, and can instead adjust their in-store operations based on feedback immediately.
Collaboration
Corporations often face clashing views from different departments, as data updates – depending on what goals are emphasized – trickle down slowly. Oftentimes, a disjunction in views leads to difficulties in management decisions and ambiguity in perceived cause factors. With mobile analytics, which allow data to be sourced at one key point as well as accessed and updated in real time, teams across different departments have the most updated information to work with and derive insight from – providing greater transparency and more ability to work well together across the corporation, which in turn leads to streamlined meetings and decision making processes.
Cloud computing is here to stay. Find out more about the cloud model by reading about the four key reasons businesses should transition to the cloud.
