Mobile 2.0 for the Enterprise and the Individual
by
Charlie Bess
In this month’s IEEE Computer magazine was an article Five Enablers for Mobile 2.0 by William Griswold. He also gave a presentation based on the same material at the Microsoft Research Facility. Much of what he presents appears to be based on the same foundation that I’ve talked about on this blog, that mobile devices in some ways are more limited, but in other ways have significantly greater capabilities for the enterprise application.
He lists 5 capabilities that are special to Mobile that future application will capitalize on:
- In situ computing – the ability to integrate the mobile app. into everyday activities. (e.g., asking questions in large or remote meeting)
- Context awareness – Since the device knows its location and the activities it can provide the user and the enterprise greater context awareness. (e.g., tell me when someone on this list is near me).
- Microtasking – attention engineering using display and notification capabilities and context to augment the user in coping with divided attention.
- Public display – facilitating public interaction based on common location (e.g., here are my thoughts from this vantage point)
- Proactivity – using the notification capabilities of the device to cause action based upon predefined rules (e.g., when you get home call the insurance company that is triggered when you actually get home)
By combining the geographic information capabilities of the device with rule’s engines, whole new levels of productivity can be had. One area that was not mentioned was the use of multiple perspectives of the same event. If everyone has the ability to pull together their unique perspective via the mobile device into a holistic view, our level of understanding of what actually happened increases.
I was in a discussion with a large chip vendor the other day and one area that I was pushing them on is taking advantage of virtualization and greater capabilities in the mobile devices. We should begin to integrate these devices as one of the security factors (e.g., something you have). For example, authorizing access when you are near a device, so that when you are logged in and briefly step away someone can’t access your session (assuming you took your phone with you). I also pushed for migration of sessions from desktop devices, to mobile devices. If the app is running in a virtual session anyway, just migrate it over to a virtual session on the mobile device so that I can continue using it. Once I get to my destination, migrate the session to that new device as well. It’s easy, it’s only software. ;-)
