New phone, new opportunities
I had one of the early Windows mobile devices back in the early part of this century (~2001) and used it to watch movies, read books, send emails… So I was a bit surprised to see a post from Mike Lachtanski saying that Smartphone video-viewing isn’t ready for prime time.
I’m taking an on-line course from Coursera on gamification right now and watch most of the lectures on my smartphone – while on the treadmill or stationary bike. It may be that I am just more tolerant than most of the small screen, but I love the ability to consume media anywhere.
Since smartphones are the computer we have with us all the time, they are the target enterprise organizations should use for first deployment of business functionality. Mobile devices can augment our capabilities and take latency out of our response to events. The BYOD movement has complicated the development and deployment but with modern development tools, it’s well within the reach of almost any organization. With SaaS, we are likely to see that the SMB market will have mobile capabilities early (if not first) since it will be backed into the services
A busy week in SF
Also trying to start a gamification course on Coursera this week. The course is divided into 12 units. We will cover two of them each week:
- What is Gamification?
- Games
- Game Thinking
- Game Elements
- Psychology and Motivation (I)
- Psychology and Motivation (II)
- Gamification Design Framework
- Design Choices
- Enterprise Gamification
- Social Good and Behavior Change
- Critiques and Risks
- Beyond the Basics
Hopefully they will be a bit forgiving if I get started late.
One a totally unrelated note -- A story I thought interesting that I heard about over the weekend that shows that the folks at NASA have a sense of humor – Curiosity’s tire tracks spell out JPL in Morse code. Since I've been a ham radio operator since about 1972 the on-going popularity of morse code is always of interest.
Is Bring Your Own Service the Future?
I mentioned a few weeks ago that a technical leader for large global services organization said that all applications will be pulled together by end users in the future – I hope he was just exaggerating by the way. He clearly sees this BYOS world as something he is planning on. His thinking though was still limited to IT.
If we even get close to this kind of environment where users create tools and relationships, then leave the organization (or even move on within the organization) and expect others to support what they built (we’ve seen before with Excel and Microsoft Access – both extremely useful tools), the IT team could easily end up being forced to support something that was done off the cuff by amateurs and then evolved into a mission critical tool. Can this happen with other parts of the business as well?
It the past I would have said that it was an enterprise governance issue. Now I wonder if it is more of an architecture issue. Can we architect flexibility into the system so that it is easier to develop, monitor and more importantly maintain these kinds of systems? I doubt that anything that smacks of a peer review will be supported by the user community.
As IT organizations look to a future of greater service orientation, they should look for service orientation of the enterprise as a whole on not just IT. IT has cloud and SaaS as examples from its domain but service orientation techniques can be broadened to other parts of the business. In the future we may not be talking about IT devices or bringing LinkedIn information services into the enterprise but other non-core services like manufacturing, distribution, HR… depending on the organization.
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HP cloud management tools for a hybrid environment
HP CloudSystem Matrix is available as a popular turnkey solution bundled with HP servers, but many don't realize that it is also available as HP CloudSystem Matrix software that can be used with non-HP systems, in existing environments.
As I think about the kind of management required as the automation concept moves out of IT and into business processes as a whole, a much better understanding of the integration needs of diverse environments will be required for these flexible approaches to burst out of IT. Cloud computing is just the IT implementation of a much larger automation trend.
