I wrote yesterday that SAP must embrace and integrate social media and collaboration technologies into its enterprise applications in order to stay relevant.

The same goes for its mobile enterprise applications. Let me explain.

At SAPPHIRE last month, SAP unveiled Sybase Unwired 2.0, the latest version of the mobile enterprise application platform it acquired when it bought Sybase last year. SAP highlighted the key features you’d expect customers to be interested in: A new software development kit for native application development; robust connections to back-end SAP systems; and beefed up security capabilities.

All good and necessary things in a comprehensive mobile platform. SAP and Sybase also released a number of new, highly targeted mobile applications, including SAP Field Service and SAP Retail Execution for mid-level workers on the go.

For SAP to make the most of its new mobile platform and extend its reach to the executive suite, however, it should focus on building, and helping outside developers build, mobile applications that better support how managers, vice presidents and C-level execs work while on the road. That means mobile applications that are event-driven and make it easy for execs to take action based on new insights.

Take mobile business intelligence (BI), for example. Despite what SAP and other BI vendors may tell you, most executives don’t squint and use mobile BI applications on smartphones to do deep dives into sales trends or profit forecasts. They do that kind of analytic work at their desks or on their laptops, where there’s enough real estate on screen to make the visuals easy to see and understand.

(Yes, the introduction of the iPad and competing tablets is changing this paradigm, but most workers don’t yet use these devices. Even if tablets overtake laptops as the dominant personal computing device in the enterprise, I still think smartphones will still serve as the default device for traveling executives.)

A useful mobile BI app doesn’t recreate complex tables and graphs on an iPhone or Android phone, but rather alerts users to significant changes to important metrics in real-time so they can do something about them. So instead of squeezing a month’s worth of sales figures by region onto a hard-to-read heat map, a good mobile BI application will send an alert to the user’s smartphone when sales in a given region dip below a predefined level or inventory levels at the warehouse grow too high. It will also offer the user a number of options to respond to the information, including, for example, pinging the relevant sales manager or decreasing incoming shipments.

Think about how you use your mobile Facebook app on your smartphone. I bet you don’t spend a lot of time just scrolling through your friends’ updates, digging into posts here and there. More likely, you open the application when you get an alert that says someone has commented on your status or you have a new friend request. When you open the alert, it gives you a list of actions you can take, such as commenting yourself or accepting/denying the friend request.

That’s how mobile enterprise applications should work too. And that goes for all mobile app vendors, not just SAP. Executives and other management types want actionable, real-time information on the go, not a jumble of numbers and colors that they must swipe and pinch and zoom in on to make sense of.