It is only a matter of time until a whole new ecosystem sprouts up resulting from the convergence of traditional enterprise business intelligence concepts with the mobile world.  Of course, like any new domain that often begins with an easily-hyped buzzword, it is not until a few articulate thought leaders provide some cogent analysis on the topic that the space really begins to coalesce.

The best I’ve read so far in this vein comes this week from Seth Grimes, a writer, analyst, strategist, and all-around visionary on business intelligence.

Grimes introduces the notion of “situational intelligence” and posits that it could represent yet another example of the disruptive innovation enabled by mobile computing.  As he points out, the data challenge in mobile is two-fold: i) delivering computing services to mobile devices, and ii) delivering location-aware services to mobile users.

On this second point, the mobile network operators hold a unique power:  they possess information about their users (location, usage patterns, profiles) that is unknown to the other stakeholders.  Imagine if the highly-tuned ad targetting algorithms of Google could be enhanced with the operational customer data records (CDRs) that mobile operators like Verizon maintain on each customer !

Doh, wait a second…

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