Mobile Strategies - Time, Place and Waste

Wasted Food

The economist, philosopher and theorist of markets Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) wrote, "The knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place - To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody's skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques."

I love the way Hayek describes the value related to "the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place," as being "socially useful."  It is also very useful for businesses and can deliver competitive advantages!  I, of course, read this as a call for mobile strategies, mobile technologies and location-based services to support the real-time exchange of information, even though Hayek may not have lived long enough to have used them himself.

Hayek goes on to write, "And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others."  

If you have ever wondered as to the competitive advantages available to your company by implementing real-time mobile communications and business analytics, this is it.  I found it profound that Hayek described the ability to optimize productivity and improve efficiencies as being as socially useful as new innovations and inventions.  Hayek was talking about sustainability and environmentally friendly before we knew the terms.

Today I read a CNN article titled World Wastes Half of Its Food, Study Finds.  The article explains where food is wasted."  This, at a high level, is due to the following:

• production inefficiencies in developing countries
• market and consumer waste in more advanced societies

The article referenced a report by the British-based independent Institution of Mechanical Engineers.  They claimed about 4.4 billion tons of food is produced annually and roughly half of it is never eaten."

Why is this food never eaten?

• inefficient harvesting
• storage problems
• transportation problems
• wasted by markets or consumers

I see an application of the words of Hayek, "The knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place - To know of surplus stock which can be drawn upon... is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques."  It's time we look at using mobile strategies and solutions, real-time business intelligence and analytics to reduce waste and improve sustainability.
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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

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Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Aberdeen Group, SAP and Mobile, Social and Cloud

"Over the previous 12-24 months the silos of social, mobile and cloud gradually began to overlap and converge with the use of cloud-enabled social technologies, or cloud-based mobility allowing enterprise workers to connect with one another across secure networks via their mobile devices." ~ Service Organizations and SoMoClo report, Aberdeen Group

Over the past 12 weeks I have met with nearly 20 large companies across Asia, North America and Europe on the subject of mobile strategies.  In all cases social and analytics were also brought into the discussion.  I agree with Aberdeen Group's findings and their belief that SoMoClo (social, mobile and cloud) are converging technologies.  Here is another excerpt from Aberdeen Group's report, "the three disruptive technologies [social, mobile, cloud] act as a unified construct: cloud is the core, mobility its edge, and social the connection through the cloud between mobile endpoints."

Gartner expands this notion by adding a fourth element, social, mobile, information and cloud to the mix.  They call these four converging technologies, "The Nexus of Forces."  My job title at Cognizant is Head Analyst for SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud).  The same four elements, but with a catchier acronym.  I can talk SMAC all day long.

The one additional element to all these acronyms that seems to be missing though is IoT (the Internet of Things or M2M).  This is an important emerging area of focus.  SAP now has dedicated executives and departments focused on M2M (machine-to-machine) interfaces to SAP, and analysts are predicting there will be 25-50 billion connected devices by 2025.  SAP partners with companies like ILS Technology to be the platform and interface between connected devices and SAP solutions.

These connected devices have cameras, barcode scanners, RFID scanners, accelerometers and an endless number of other sensors on them.  These sensors are collecting data in real-time and wirelessly sending it to a central service for analysis.  This massive amount of new data, plus the ability to operate machines remotely from great distances [think UAVs/Drones for example] will soon change the way many businesses operate and will provide many areas of competitive advantages.
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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Twitter, Smartphones, TV and Real-Time Feedback

There was an interesting article by John Letzing in the The Wall Street Journal on December 18, 2012, titled Twitter Creates New TV Metric.  It was about a new partnership between Twitter and the TV ratings giant Nielsen Co.  Apparently, Twitter becomes very active around different TV shows and Nielsen wants to be able to monitor and report on this activity.

Letzing writes that the joint service called, Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, will develop a metric based on Twitter activity.  These days, TV viewers increasingly have one hand on the remote and the other on their smartphone tweeting.  The new service will gauge "the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter," and provide "TV networks and advertisers the real-time metrics required to understand TV audience social activity."

This is a fascinating development to me.  It is a real-time-virtual-meets-human-meets-virtual-meets-bigdata (#VMHMVMBD) solution.  My apologies for the acronym.  It just seemed like a requirement.  This kind of real-time feedback has the potential to significantly impact broadcasters, TV production companies and the advertising industry.  I can imagine companies wanting to get immediate viewer feedback on new ad campaigns before making long term commitments.  I can see completely new business models erupting based on real-time tweets.  I can see companies connecting ad agency fees and contractual terms to the real-time social sentiment.

This partnership demonstrates more time-space compression.  There is less time between an event and event feedback.  Less time between feedback and adjustments or changes.  Viewers opinions from across a wide geographical landscape are immediately known.

The increasing pace of business introduced by social, mobile, analytics and cloud solutions will be a very interesting development in 2013.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Measuring the Value of Social and Mobile Solutions in the Enterprise

"The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past."  Stephen Baker

How does one measure the value of mobilizing and socializing an enterprise?  In the book Social Business by Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies, written by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim, they report that in 2010, McKinsey and Company published survey results of companies engaged in social business activities that  showed firms engaged systematically in social business processes had 24 percent higher revenue.  Frost and Sullivan found similar results showing companies that deployed social tools saw improved performance in innovation (68 percent versus 39 percent that didn’t deploy), sales growth (76 percent versus 50 percent that didn’t deploy), and profit growth (71 percent versus 45 percent that didn’t deploy).  From those results it appears something good happens to companies when they embrace the social business concept.  I think it is too early to say exactly how these improvements happened, but at this stage it is simply important to recognize the correlation.

Measuring the ROIs for mobile and social is difficult.  We know the exercise of determining an ROI is useful in order to set priorities, but most of us, down deep know these innovations are important and necessary even if we cannot exactly identify the ROI.  They have significantly changed the way we all communicate in our personal lives, and they are guaranteed to change the way we communicate in our work lives as well.  These innovations are changing the very way business is done.   At the least we should be studying these trends and engaging in pilot projects.

Some of the most significant changes social and mobile technologies are making in the enterprise today are based on:

• faster communications
• more open exchanges of ideas
• reduced communication channel hierarchies that prevent open communication
• communication accountability - names are associated with ideas
• faster identification of problems
• knowledge exchange
• more collaborative decision-making
• shared situational awareness
• data-driven decision-making

What is the value of having enterprise-wide situational awareness?  What is the value of being able to see an entire project or account discussion in one collaboration site?  What is the value of eliminating artificial barriers to ideas and innovations?  It is a whole new way of doing things and we may have to develop new yardsticks for measuring these capabilities.
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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

M2M, Social and Enterprise Mobility Strategies and Trends

Just about every 2013 analyst report I have read this month identifies social, mobile, the Internet of Things and analytics as the big trends.  These trends, often called SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud), are dramatically changing the way businesses operate.  Here is a description of the wide ranging impact of some of these, "Machine-to-machine-to-human connectivity will have a profound impact on the consumer and home experience, as well as transportation systems, retail, industrial supply chains, energy grids, security and public safety," writes Malcolm Frank, EVP of Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant Technology Services.

One of the many challenges SMAC presents is that it can dramatically increase the amount of data your enterprise needs to manage.  This challenge has motivated the folks from Gartner to highlight business intelligence and analytics as the current number-one priority for corporate IT.

I am a firm believer that company's need to have an overall strategy when trying to absorb all of these new ideas, innovations and technologies.  One very good place to start is to have a Network Centric Operational view in order to effectively manage and embrace these trends.  Here is how Wikipedia describes it - Network Centric Operations seek to translate an information advantage, enabled in part by information technology, into a competitive advantage through the robust networking [read mobile and social technologies] of well informed geographically dispersed groups.  This networking—combined with changes in technology, organization, processes, and people—may allow new forms of organizational behavior.

I believe the "new forms" of organizational behavior are being accelerated by social collaboration among the mobile, connected and well informed.

Specifically, the theory [Network Centric Operations] contains the following four tenets in its hypotheses:

1. A robustly networked organization improves information sharing.
2. Information sharing enhances the quality of information and shared situational awareness.
3. Shared situational awareness enables collaboration and self-synchronization, and enhances sustainability and speed of decision making and execution.
4. These three points dramatically increase operational effectiveness.

Over the past year I have traveled the world sharing mobile and SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) strategies and have had dozens of discussions with executive teams.  As a result of these discussions, I have come to appreciate the value of having a concept/strategy in place first to serve as a conceptual framework for how to understand the ways new technologies can and should be used to further business goals.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Data, Filtering and Real-Time Decision Making

Yesterday I was reading an interesting whitepaper titled Don't Get SMACked - How Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud Technologies are Reshaping the Enterprise by Malcolm Frank, EVP of Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant.  In this paper he writes, "The rapid growth in computing devices and data will soon drive many industries to a "tipping point," where the economics of information will usurp those of capital and hard assets."  This statement aligns with an article written by Gartner's Douglas Laney titled Infonomics: The Practice of Information Economics, where he states, "Information should be considered a new asset class in that it has measurable economic value and that there are significant strategic, operational and financial reasons for doing so.”  The bottom line is that companies that can better utilize information have a massive competitive advantage.

If you can collect data, communicate data, analyze data and report on data faster than your competition, and get it to the right people, at the right time, in the right amount on the right device, then you will have a great advantage.  These abilities, Laney proposes, will have a significant impact on a company's bottom line.

In the military today they have a term called "Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)."  It is often associated with the use of modern data collecting technologies, communications technologies, information analysis and the use of these technologies to improve strategies, doctrines and organizational structures.  The US Military believes that in future warfare, the size of the opponent and their platforms [weapons], will be less reflective of military power than the quality of sensors [data collection] systems and mobile communication links and their ability to utilize information to their advantage.

What does this mean to your company in 2013?  It means your enterprise must transform and focus on its abilities to:

• Collect information faster
• Communicate information faster
• Analyze and filter information faster
• Report the analysis faster to decision makers
• Strive for the goals of being a "real-time" and "data-driven" enterprise

Mobile technologies play a critical role in this transformation.  However, it is very important we understand mobility is but an enabler of an overall information strategy.  The success of our enterprise over the next few years will largely be the result of how smart we are with the use of information.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Enterprise Mobility, Legos and Mobile Trends in 2013

I have a world class collection of Legos.  With the exception of a few pieces lost to predatory vacuum cleaners, I have preserved them in a large Rubbermaid container throughout the years as our children have grown.  Legos are very simple.  They are blocks of varying size that all fit together in a standardized manner.  So as long as you don't mix non-standard pieces in with the standard, they all fit together with ease.   As simple as these blocks are, however, masterpieces can be made with them.   It is not the pieces that are interesting, it is the objects you can design with them.  I view mobile solutions in much the same way.

I believe 2013 will be the year of mobile strategy and design.  The components necessary for implementing enterprise mobility solutions are all in place.  Answering the questions of what to do with these components, optimizing ROIs and designing the best solutions that will offer the most competitive advantages should be the primary focuses.

I have noted with interest an emerging mobile industry trend.  Many of the large mobility vendors are changing their focus and strategy from building their own mobile application development tools, to utilizing third-party app development tools that are already widely used and accepted.  Mobility vendors are turning their attentions to building more robust platforms that can support a wide range of developer tools.  This is a significant industry trend.  It will impact the business models of mobility vendors.  It will be interesting to watch this play out.

When I was the CEO of a mobile application company, we were always looking to add as much value as possible into the developer tools we built so we could entice customers to standardize on our proprietary development environment.  That enabled us to lock-in our customers and have more dependable long-term license revenue.  Those times seem to be gone.

The components of a mobile solution are becoming commoditized.  Yes, they are absolutely valuable and required, but you can get good solutions from many sources today.  The strategic value of enterprise mobility today is less about the tools you are using, and more about the new business models and processes you are enabling.  Your success will be measured on your ability to support existing enterprise systems and integrate with emerging social, analytics and cloud solutions.

My analysis at the end of 2012 is that the mobile platform vendor market is evolving rapidly.  It is probing many different directions and exploring different business models trying to understand where the market is heading.  This market moves so fast mobility vendors are struggling to understand the areas where they should be investing.  In an effort to reduce investing in the wrong areas, they are retreating from the app development tools market and leaving that to more general third-party tool vendors.  They are changing their value propositions.

Mobility is of the utmost importance today.  It is mission critical.  As a result, ERP and large enterprise software application vendors will be developing or acquiring their own mobile platforms for their customer base.  This means, the unaffiliated mobile platform vendors will be shifting their focus to the SME markets, niche and vertical solutions, investigating a variety of cloud based, SaaS business models and looking to be acquired.

The mobile solution market is huge, growing fast and rolling forward like a train.  However, unlike a train it is hard to predict where it is going.  The mobility market may in fact be absorbed by the general software application market.  When all software is mobile, there is no longer a need for a separate mobile app development market, and when all ERPs have a platform to standardize mobile connectivity, this market changes as well.  This leads us back to where we began.

2013 is the year of mobile strategy and design.  It is the year of building masterpieces with your mobile lego set.  Find the app development tools that will support your strategy and maximize your flexibility to evolve with your business and with technology trends.  Find a mobile platform vendor that will support today's and tomorrow's needs.  Find your most creative business and technology minds and build your masterpiece.

May your 2013 be filled with joy and learning!

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Strategies and Gartner's 2013 Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends

Have you seen Gartner's recently published 2013 top ten strategic technology trends?  If not here they are:

1. Mobile Devices Battles
2. Mobile Applications and HTML5
3. Personal Cloud
4. Internet of Things
5. Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
6. Strategic Big Data
7. Actionable Analytics
8. Mainstream In-Memory Computing
9. Integrated Ecosystems
10. Enterprise App Stores

I come from an enterprise mobility background and a focus on mobile strategies, so when I read this list I see mobility written in just about every one of these.  Four of the top ten are all about enterprise mobility.  Four through nine are related to managing a real-time enterprise, optimizing a mobile workforce, and understanding the value of data driven decision making.  Again, all crucial elements to an effective enterprise mobility strategy.

My views are closely aligned with what Gartner views as the top ten strategic technology trends for 2013, with the exception of social collaboration platforms.  I view social collaboration platforms as deserving to be on this list.  I think I would bundle several of the analytics categories together and give a space to collaboration.

I am going to climb back on my soap box for a moment and say that now businesses need to invest in understanding how these categories can be used strategically to gain competitive advantages.  The biggest obstacle to many companies is the lack of education and realization of how these technologies will impact their industry, markets and businesses.  These technology trends are not minor.  These technology trends will change the way the discipline of management is practiced, the way decisions are made, the operational speed in which business is conducted, and competitive landscapes.

The technology trends identified here are transformational.  Vice Admiral (retired) Arthur K. Cebrowski shared the following concepts while serving at the Office of Force Transformation, "Transformation is meant to deal with the evolution of concepts, processes, organizations and technology.  Change in any one of these four areas necessitates change in all."  The bottom line is that these technology trends point toward a need for change in concepts, processes and organizations. 

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

SMAC Tsunamis and Mobile Strategies

I was reminded these past few weeks of the many challenges organizations have keeping their business and IT strategies aligned with rapidly evolving technology innovations and changes in their marketplaces.  Two weeks ago I attended a military related conference and listened as the different military branches shared their mobile strategies and the processes they must follow in order to bring new solutions online.  Yikes!  It is incredibly challenging as their administrative processes for acquiring new technologies typically take years, but mobile technologies are evolving much quicker than that.

Even though the military processes are necessarily cumbersome for acquiring new technologies, testing them, and then going through formal RFPs and contract negotiations, their strategies for how to use mobile solutions are well defined.  This is different from the commercial sector where it is often relatively easy to acquire new technologies, but there lacks a mobile strategy to support it.

Last week I taught mobile strategy and SMAC (social, mobile, analytic and cloud) strategy sessions in England, Scotland and Belgium.  It was a crazy travel schedule, but what an adventure!  I was again impressed with the need for more combined training between business and IT - training that educates business on the possibilities of these technologies, and IT on what it takes to support them.

Social, mobile, analytics and Cloud, plus the Internet of Things are hitting markets like a tsunami.   One of the key points I emphasize in my strategy sessions is that this SMAC tsunami, or the "Nexus of Forces" as Gartner describes them, is approaching and overtaking companies whether it fits into their three year plan or not.  Companies don't operate in a vacuum.  They can't always dictate the timeframe of technology waves and innovations.  Somehow companies must recognize these important trends and change rapidly from a Plan A, to a Plan B or C in order to remain upright.

I am seeing entire industries overturned by these technologies.  I am seeing new business models appear and rapidly changing competitive landscapes.  The questions I get asked daily now are,  "How will these technologies impact my industry and business, and how should we respond?"  It is interesting to note these are mostly business strategy related questions.

The military, although they have slow processes, often have well defined strategies.  In the commercial sector I see relatively fast processes but a lack of strategies today.  This offers enormous opportunities for companies that can see these tsunamis approaching, get prepared and use these forces to achieve competitive advantages.

I will be discussing many of these new trends, innovations and strategies tomorrow on a live webinar at 11 AM EST.  I invite you to join me.  Mike Karlskind, VP of Service Optimization Strategies with ClickSoftware, and I will be discussing, "The Role Big Data Plays in Real-Time Enterprises, Mobile Strategies and Field Services."  Register Here!

Registration Link: http://go.clicksoftware.com/role-big-data-plays-with-real-time-enterprise-mobile-strategies-and-field-services.html?utm_source=December18thWebinarKB.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.