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Mobile business intelligence will significantly expand the population of BI users to include a more mainstream audience--an opportunity that will attract significant investment, says Gartner.

Gartner says organisations are starting to piece together collaboration technology, social software and BI to create collaborative decision making environments. During the next 12 to 18 months, these efforts will continue to grow as organisations start to more proactively manage, capture and optimize decision processes and outcomes to improve performance beyond the decision inputs such as BI.

Gartner advises organisations to work with the marketing department and product management to create customer-facing mobile BI applications, and with the supply chain group for supplier applications. They should recognise that users will want to use mobile devices to access corporate BI data. They also need to ensure that the current BI infrastructure supports these demands while promoting the use of tablets to improve the BI experience of the mobile workforce.

As the speed of response and data volumes increase, organisations will look for columnar data repositories and in-memory online analytical processing (OLAP) that is faster and easier to architect.

Organisations should evaluate trade-offs between build and buy approaches to meet a diverse range of use cases and consider making integration a top selection criteria rather than creating a new information silo.

By 2014, 40% of spending on business analytics will go to system integrators, not software vendors.

Gartner recommends that organisations allow business users to participate in any decision to purchase a software-only or services/software solution. They need to broaden their evaluations to include service providers, and evaluate them based on industry expertise and best practice in addition to functions and architecture. Finally, they need to consider how solutions will tie into existing investments.

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