Mobile Business Intelligence Acceptance Model

In the advent of portable ICT, mobile devices are increasingly deployed in activities which require human mobility. The general factor for organizations to deploy mobile devices is to facilitate real-time information management and to improve the productivity of mobile workforce. Moreover, the need for intelligent business information in real time envisioned mobile BI. Gangadharan and Swami stated that decisions made at all organizational levels and supporting analytic tools make up a big population which making the user acceptance considerable issue for mobile BI vendors.

BI technologies and concepts has evolved from DBMS-based with structured content which known as Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A) 1.0 to Web-based BI&A 2.0 till the emerging of BI&A 3.0 which emphasize on the analysis of mobile and sensor-based content. The evolution enables shifting paradigm to integrate BI system into mobile device. Brodzinski et al. highlighted that mobile BI is the latest frontier to drive demand among organizations. Generally, mobile BI is using the same concept as traditional BI which uses mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets as a mean to deliver the representation of the data instead of desktop application. Mobile BI presents data in the form of dashboards and visualization, interactive reporting, analysis, data exploration, or reporting instead of an independent document where it designed specifically for handheld users.

Various definitions of mobile BI are available in literature. Verkooij and Spruit defined mobile BI as "capability that enables the mobile workforce to gain business insights through information analysis using applications optimized for mobile devices". Whereas Stipić & Bronzin defined mobile BI as "a procedure in which data critical for making decisions is made available to end users in appropriate applications and devices that can be in any way considered mobile. This allows users to make their decisions much faster and more accurately". Similar definition has been stated by Kashora that "mobile business intelligence is a procedure in which data critical for making decisions is made available to end users in appropriate applications and mobile devices such as smartphones and Tablet-PCs".

Sajjad et al. stated that mobile BI approach is to take the front end view of BI onto mobile devices. Traditional BI systems deployed in local servers cannot provide real-time, accurate, and comprehensive information and knowledge. The demand from mobile for updated information with combination of real time data integration requires a necessity for mobile BI. As a solution for remote data retrieval, mobile BI introduces a new way of delivering via mobile devices. Ubiquitous remote access of mobile BI reduces the limitation of executive management staffs to their desks and office-based PCs make the traditional executive workspace obsolete.

There are various mobile BI which offer variety functionalities in the market. For instance, BusinessObjects Mobile allows viewing and manipulating reports from BusinessObjects XI via mobile devices such as Blackberry or Windows Mobile; Cognos Go! Mobile offers wireless access to Cognos BI data via a mobile client and SAP's offered mobile BI with capability to publish information to an intranet portal or mobile device.