Bring business intelligence to wireless computing - Industry Trend or Event

Communications News, May, 2001 by Michael Corcoran

Weigh the options available among wireless devices.

Wireless computing is here to stay. By 2003, according to the Gartner Group, more hand-held devices will be connected to the Internet than personal computers. People increasingly expect to use those devices to get critical business information--anywhere, anytime. That means they need a current view of an enterprise's operational information.

To meet these new informational needs, business intelligence must be brought to wireless computing. Here are the central challenges:

* There is no single standard for mobile devices, and most organizations cannot standardize on one device.

* Bandwidth, speed and viewing limitations require highly summarized information.

* Mobile devices get and send information in different ways.

* Wireless connections are not 100% dependable.

Adding to the challenge is enterprises cannot control which device type employees will use to obtain business information from the organization. The devices are relatively inexpensive, so people often purchase their own to use for business purposes.

Even if you were to insist that one device be used for all interactions with your corporate information, you could not control the devices themselves, which adhere to no single application standard. Many hoped the wireless application protocol (WAP) would be that standard, but WAP has significant weaknesses and limitations, and defections are on the rise. There is no single competing standard to take its place, and some of the most popular devices have gone their own way with fully proprietary networks.

The bottom line is a no-standards application environment on the user side, with one notable exception. These devices and their networks all support e-mail, and e-mail adheres to standards.

BANDWIDTH, SPEED AND VIEWING LIMITATIONS

Because hand-held devices are designed for speed and portability, mobile solutions must "tweeze" critical information out of the vast array of available data. Device users cannot sit around tweezing all day. You have to do it for them, then present that highly summarized information to their small screens in a quickly and easily read format.

Sophisticated business intelligence software is needed to accurately and usefully summarize information generated and stored throughout the enterprise. Such software should be able, for example, to easily summarize key performance indicators and deliver these summaries on a scheduled basis to managers who need to measure and monitor the general health of their organizations.

With the exception of Windows CE hand-helds, mobile devices cannot accept attached files, the standard way most information delivery solutions provide reports to users. Delivering a report as an e-mail message tailored for small-screen presentation is possible, however. E-mail has the ability to minimize performance and bandwidth issues, because messages are typically small files. In addition, email latency is about the same as the wireless Internet.

There are two basic methods--push and pull--for delivering business intelligence to hand-held devices. Each operates under a different assumption about who is in charge, when the information will be obtained and why it is needed.

Push means automating the scheduled delivery of information, or alerting management and key employees about critical events as they occur. Organizations need to respond immediately to changes in business information, wherever that information originates or people who need it are located. Examples of pushed information could include financial performance and customer status alerts, or routine employee 401K notifications.

PULL FOR INFORMATION

Pull is the ability to request information on demand. It is an excellent method for making public applications and general consumption reports--for example, inventory on-hand information-available on a self-service basis. Employees can pull information from a simple launch form, such as Palm's PQAs, or--as in the case of data-ready cell phones or Pocket PCs--the device accesses a website powered by a reporting engine.

In the case of the inventory on-hand report, you can pull down information like products, release numbers or platforms. When selections are made, the report is sent to the wireless network, over the Web and into the reporting engine, which will connect to the appropriate corporate resource, dynamically generate information from it, and immediately deliver that information back to the device owner.

Losing a cell phone connection in mid-sentence is a fact of life in today's wireless world, and it is just as true for wireless computing as for voice communication. One way to circumvent potential data loss from interrupted connections is to employ messaging. E-mail is the obvious answer here. If you are using e-mail, the system simply waits for you to connect, and if for any reason it cannot deliver that e-mail to you, it continues to wait until it can.

One wireless business intelligence solution employs two-way e-mail information delivery to let people get information directly from corporate systems in the form of e-mail messages--and then request and receive additional details from those systems automatically, without human intervention. This approach enables organizations to provide cost-effective, reliable and secure access to existing enterprise information sources through any hand-held device without having to build custom interfaces or a new infrastructure.