Smart (phone) Decision

The problems in many businesses today are not the result of bad decisions—they are the result of inattention, delay, and the decisions that are not made.

It is human nature to prioritize familiar problems, talk to the people we know best, and stay in our comfort zone. Busy executives are no different. In fact, the busier they are, the more likely they are to spend those rare moments of pro-active time in their comfort zone. We read about it every day—organizations both large and small trip up over issues that would have been relatively simple to prevent, had someone been on the case.

Less discussed, but perhaps more familiar to the retail IT community, is that expensive and well designed business intelligence systems often fail to deliver expected results. This stands in stark contrast to the repeated success stories with more operationally focused supply chain or inventory management projects (see sidebar).

We believe that the current generation of Smartphones is starting to help address this problem by using business intelligence systems with Mobile Executive Business Intelligence systems (MEBIs) that help bridge the gap between performance data and executives management processes. We call this gap the last two feet, the distance from computer screen to brain.

What is Mobile Executive Business Intelligence systems?

MEBIs are all about simplicity and focus:

• They are designed to exploit the strengths of the mobile phone: ubiquity, handiness, and ease of use.
• They take advantage of the constraints, notably screen size, to drive simplicity.
• They simply focus on getting the right issues addressed by the right people, and specifically getting the right phone calls made!