Affecting Decision-Makers’ Attention through Mobile BI: Implications for Mobile BI Design Process

Abstract

Mobile business intelligence (BI) enables the mobile workforce to attain knowledge by providing access to information assets anytime anywhere. Mobile BI’s main aim is to support decision-makers during the decision making processes. In decision situations many issues may be relevant, but it is impossible for decision-makers to attend to all of them as decision-makers are constrained by their limited capacity of attention. This paper uses the attention-based view theory to explore mobile BI and discuss its implications in terms of decision-makers’ attention and design process. The results of this study are based on analyses of published material, e.g. trade press and white papers, and semi-structured interviews with important stakeholders in the mobile BI field. This paper shows that the access to issues and answers anytime anywhere via mobile BI and its alerting capabilities affect the focus of attention of the decision-makers. The stakeholders should be actively involved in the design process so that the efficiency and effectiveness of mobile BI in the distribution of the decision-makers’ attention will be enhanced.