Mobile Business Intelligence: Are businesses ready to pick up the pace of investment?

The verdict is still out on whether organizations will embrace the idea of equipping workforces with the applications necessary to be able to gain business insights and conduct information analysis from their mobile devices.

MSDynamicsWorld.com has reported on several votes of confidence in the last year about the promise of investing in mobile BI and analytics capabilities. Not least of those investments is from Microsoft itself. The Dynamics NAV 2015 tablet client has received positive reviews, in part for its ability surface reports for users in different roles using Microsoft BI capabilities driven by Office 365. And the tablet-based Business Analyzer app, which was designed to work with multiple Dynamics ERP products, has expanded from Windows to iOS and Android.

Enterprise Apps Today picked up some new and varied opinions on the matter in a recent piece, including a recent BARC survey which found that use of mobile BI among companies was up just 2 percent over the last year.

"While it is common for surveys like BARC's to reveal gaps between plans and actual implementation...the gap for mobile BI was quite large," Ann All writes, noting that companies are beginning to realize that deploying mobile business intelligence requires more than simply porting BI software to mobile devices or purchasing mobile BI apps. And, she continues, for many companies the costs of implementing mobile business intelligence simply may outweigh the benefits.

In her article, All also cited a mobile BI study by Dresner Advisory Services, which revealed a more consistent interest in mobile business intelligence. While the percentage of ...