Editor’s Note: The Enterprise Mobility Foundation is proud to welcome Maribel Lopez, Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research, as its latest guest columnist. Maribel has a tremendous background and pedigree in enterprise mobility and will provide this community tremendous insights on the subject. Welcome, Maribel!
I spent several days last week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, which is one of the premier independent trade shows that focuses on collaborative technologies. The who’s who of collaboration presented on new features and new platforms and the chief scientist from BT managed to annoy and/or shock the audience with his free form slides and thoughts on how collaborative technologies are changing the landscape. The great irony of the show was that discussion of mobility was largely non-existent.
I did moderate the only panel on enterprise mobility and it was a well-attended breakout. Cisco did mention in passing that its QUAD solution would work on an iPhone and an iPad, but overall there was minimal dialogue on how mobility changes the application landscape. I considered that mobility might already be considered an integral part of the collaborative technologies landscape. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that mobility was still considered an overlay or just another channel.
Yes, mobility is a channel and as one of my fellow panelists said it will be the primary channel on which E.2 is delivered in the years to come. Why is this important? A system designed with mobility in mind acts differently than today’s systems. The most immediate feature that mobile-aware collaboration technologies enable is context. For example, you can have enhanced presence that is aware of device type, capabilities and location information. But you can also incorporate the context of the personal as well as professional social graph. Mobility also requires building solutions that can operate with intermittent connectivity. And in the short term, it also requires creating applications that can take advantage various operating systems as well as the evolving mobile web.
But the real win for mobile-aware collaboration is creating the shortest path to the most valuable information that is aggregated from multiple sources. Lets consider how the one-touch widgets on the iPhone have changed our perceptions of browsing and application access. We aren’t willing to drill down five screens to get see data. Users desire one screen visibility to what is important. E.20 collaboration tools are offering one screen access to data from document management systems and social software. Going forward mobile aware collaboration tools will also need to integrate specific information from various applications and databases such as CRM, inventory, logistics and the contact center records.
If E2.0 vendors and enterprises don’t design for mobility at the outset, it will be difficult to leverage the true potential of the existing data in both intracompany as well as intercompany collaboration.
Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, a mobile market research and strategy consulting firm. You can connect with Maribel here.
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E 2.0 Conference Reflections: Mobility Must Be Part of The Design Process
I spent several days last week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, which is one of the premier independent trade shows that focuses on collaborative technologies. The who’s who of collaboration presented on new features and new platforms and the chief scientist from BT managed to annoy and/or shock the audience with his free form slides and thoughts on how collaborative technologies are changing the landscape. The great irony of the show was that discussion of mobility was largely non-existent.
I did moderate the only panel on enterprise mobility and it was a well-attended breakout. Cisco did mention in passing that its QUAD solution would work on an iPhone and an iPad, but overall there was minimal dialogue on how mobility changes the application landscape. I considered that mobility might already be considered an integral part of the collaborative technologies landscape. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that mobility was still considered an overlay or just another channel.
Yes, mobility is a channel and as one of my fellow panelists said it will be the primary channel on which E.2 is delivered in the years to come. Why is this important? A system designed with mobility in mind acts differently than today’s systems. The most immediate feature that mobile-aware collaboration technologies enable is context. For example, you can have enhanced presence that is aware of device type, capabilities and location information. But you can also incorporate the context of the personal as well as professional social graph. Mobility also requires building solutions that can operate with intermittent connectivity. And in the short term, it also requires creating applications that can take advantage various operating systems as well as the evolving mobile web.
But the real win for mobile-aware collaboration is creating the shortest path to the most valuable information that is aggregated from multiple sources. Lets consider how the one-touch widgets on the iPhone have changed our perceptions of browsing and application access. We aren’t willing to drill down five screens to get see data. Users desire one screen visibility to what is important. E.20 collaboration tools are offering one screen access to data from document management systems and social software. Going forward mobile aware collaboration tools will also need to integrate specific information from various applications and databases such as CRM, inventory, logistics and the contact center records.
If E2.0 vendors and enterprises don’t design for mobility at the outset, it will be difficult to leverage the true potential of the existing data in both intracompany as well as intercompany collaboration.
Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, a mobile market research and strategy consulting firm. You can connect with Maribel here.