Notes and Videos from the Mobile World Congress 2013, Part 2

Day Two of the Mobile World Congress 2013, and also Wrinkle Tuesday.  My hotel does not have irons or ironing boards and it was on the MWC 2013 recommended list...ugh.

Here are some notes from my observations and discussions on Day 2:

1. SAP Mobile Documents - this is an internally developed solution that acts like a secure Dropbox, but able to be central managed by IT.  Very useful!
2. SAP is discussing M2M and/or The Internet of Things in at least two different locations here.  They have a demo in the Connected City, and a demo of a smart vending machine in their booth.
3. Dropbox is also showing off an enterprise version.  You can now switch between a personal Dropbox and your enterprise version (secured and managed by your IT).
4. SAP has developed several very interesting mobile B2C apps with deep social engagement models built in.  I love it.  One for sports teams and the other involving fashions and clothing.
5. Firefox showing off their new mobile phones.
6. SAP announced an M2M partnership with Ericsson.

I attended the Mobile Premier Apps awards session last night.  Several dozen start-ups were judged by different expert panels for viability and awards. There are many very clever developers out there. My favorite was BlindSquare.  A location based solution with audio information for the blind.  

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant

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Read the insightful whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked

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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.

2013 Mobility Trends

In this short video I review the findings and predictions from Gartner and comScore for 2013 mobility and other digital trends.  Enjoy!  Video Link: http://youtu.be/YYmKYkQwWnw

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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.

Kevin Benedict on Enterprise Mobility and Collaboration

Last week while speaking with CIOs and IT strategists in Europe the topic of enterprise collaboration came up often.  Of course, I was usually the one to raise it, but it is a natural extension of enterprise mobility so I am justified!  You can now have real-time communications with all of your brightest minds via mobile devices.  Why not use it!  Why not provide real-time collaboration apps that enable you to have full situational awareness within your company?  You can keep updated and contribute to all the important discussions and debates no matter your geographical location.

In this short video, I discuss the impact mobility and collaboration platforms are having and will continue to have on many different aspects of your business.  Enjoy!

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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.

Mobility is the Conduit of Business Transformation

This week I am teaching mobile and social strategies and will be visiting four countries in four days.  This type of schedule is a blur of airports, meeting new people and learning more about how mobile and social solutions are being used in the real world.  While on these trips I have a lot of time to ponder on flights.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the the word conduit - a means by which something is received and/or transmitted, as a useful way of describing mobile devices.  Mobile devices are a conduit for voice communications.  Mobile devices are a conduit for social networks.  Mobile devices are a conduit for email, news, data collection, photos/videos, and now as e-wallets and mobile payments.  So much of our lives are now run through this conduit.

In the last couple of weeks I have spent time with over a dozen companies keenly interested in the impact of mobility and social trends on their business.  In each case, the impact will be different, but significant.  In many cases the impact of these trends will be monumental.

Let's talk about retail financial services for a moment.  In the book Bank 3.0 by Brett King, he states, "Retail financial service brands today are a collection of experiences, increasingly defined by multichannel interactions and customer discussions and debates in the social media space."  The term multichannel interactions means communicating with a bank or other retail financial services company through a variety of different means including online, call centers, mobile, ATM (machines), physical offices, etc.  Increasingly, however, these interactions are via mobile devices.

King uses the phrase a "collection of experiences" to describe a financial services company's interactions with customers and prospects.  These experiences, often via online and mobile, are now the discussion of the blogosphere and social networks.  As a result, it is critically important that companies invest time and money to ensuring these experiences are the best they can be.

Social networks are accelerators for good or bad.  If something good happens, the world can know about it in seconds.  Likewise, if something bad happens the world can know about it in seconds.  The rules of the PR game have changed.  Increasingly people go to their networks for recommendations rather than to the manufacturer of the product or the provider of a service.  They trust their networks more than the companies providing the product.

Companies need to operate their businesses and invest in their businesses to meet their customers via the channels their customers are using.  If customers are moving away from visiting physical buildings and preferring to interact with a company via a mobile app, then companies need that mobile app to be the very best possible.  Companies that resist supporting the interaction channels preferred by their markets are in trouble.  If you work for one of these companies - right the ship.

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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.

Speed, Change and Mobile Banking

I am reading an interesting book titled Bank 3.0 by Brett King.  In this book King discusses the revolution and upcoming demolition of traditional banks in light of mobility.  Here are some interesting numbers from the book:

• In 1980 - credit cards took 14 days to approve, personal loans 7-14 days, home mortgages 30+ days.
• In 2008 - credit card were instantly approved, personal loans pre-approved/24 hours, home mortgages 24 hours.

The increase in speed between 1980 and 2008 was primarily the result of the internet evolution and e-commerce.  Now jump forward to 2013, and mobility is the cause of the next increase in tempo.  People with mobile devices want instant access to their personal account information.  They want their business relationships and shopping experiences to be wonderful, convenient, digitized and instant.  

My wife is my guide in this area.  She wants a great mobile app from any company we work with.  She directly associates the brand quality with the mobile app quality.

We are quickly coming up on a time when banks need to completely rethink their purpose and retool.  Many of us receive our paychecks electronically.  We receive and pay our bills electronically.  We use debit and credit cards for most transactions, and checks are nearly obsolete.  This is the digitization of banking.  The less cash we use, the less need for ATMs, and the less need for bank buildings. 

Our mobile banking apps become our bank, and banking is a service that is offered by our mobile apps.  Research shows we access our banking information many times more in a year via a mobile app than through our bank branch.  The unstoppable trend is already here.  

King points out in his book, that once banking becomes "unhinged" from a physical building, banking becomes a "thing" that can be offered by many different kinds of companies.  Suddenly banks find themselves competing with a new and massive number of different companies offering a variety of traditionally bank only services.

Traditional banks need to immediately understand the mobile app is the new bank, and services will include mobile banking, mobile payments, e-wallets, financial services, advice, social interactions, guidance, gamification of our financial plans, Big Data comparisons with others in our demographic etc. Competition will come from companies far outside of traditional banking circles.

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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.

Business Transformation Involving Mobile and Social Technologies

Over the last few weeks I had a chance to read a number of interesting books and articles on transformative trends and technologies and wanted to share some of my notes.  I hope you find them useful and interesting as well.

Mobile and Social Transforming Power Structures

By 2010, 70 percent of all information generated every year in the world came from e-mails, online videos, and the World Wide Web. This dramatic change in the linked technologies of computing and communications is changing the nature of government and accelerating a diffusion of power.  ~ The Future of Power by Joseph Nye

World politics is no longer the sole province of governments thanks to social media and mobile technologies.

The real challenge is acting strategically enough to matter. ~ Social Business By Design

As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/technology/employers-social-media-policies-come-under-regulatory-scrutiny.html?_r=0       

Media Transformation Caused by the Internet and Mobility

The Financial Times said it would try to eliminate 35 editorial jobs through voluntary means and add ten jobs as part of its focus on "digital" and a move away from news to "a networked business."  Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times, wrote that a trip to Silicon Valley in September had "confirmed the speed of change" and added, “We must also recognize that the Internet offers new avenues and platforms for the richer delivery and sharing of information.”

More from ZDNET, “Google's content production costs are small and so are its distribution costs, which means it can sell advertising at very low rates and still make large profits.  The FT, or any type of traditional media organization, cannot compete against a Silicon Valley media company that can thrive on such low advertising rates.”

http://www.zdnet.com/media-disruption-continues-to-hurt-newspapers-7000010112/   

A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, found that in the past 12 months, 13 percent of survey participants visited a library website using a smartphone or tablet.  The overall number of library users has shrunk.

Transforming IT Infrastructures and the Cloud

In a recent survey of 2,000 CIOs, a Gartner report revealed that the execs' top tech priorities for 2013 include cloud computing in general, as well as its specific types: software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS).

Here are comScore’s Top 10 Burning Digital Issues for 2013:

1. Big Date
2.  e-Commerce
3. Social Media
4. Shift of Ad Spending to Digital
5. Audience Targeting vs. Media Location
6. Measuring Digital Media Campaigns
7. Growth of Smartphones and Tablets
8. Multi-Platform Media Planning and Analysis
9. Real-Time Marketing Insights
10. Privacy

http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/The_Top_Ten_Burning_Issues_in_Digital

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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.

The Role of a Mobile Strategist

Tomorrow, Wednesday January 16 at 2 PM EST, I will be discussing "9 Reasons Every Business Needs a Mobile Strategist" on a live webinar with Jim Somers, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, with Antenna Software.  This is an interesting topic to me as nearly every executive team I meet is struggling with the development of a mobile strategy.

I think the reason developing a mobile strategy is so difficult may be related to this excerpt I came across recently in the book Social Business By Design, "The real challenge is to act strategically enough to matter."  Mobility matters, it really, really matters and this means uncomfortable change.  Let's think about this excerpt together, "The real challenge is to act strategically enough to matter."  What does that mean to you?  I think about companies just slowly dipping their toe in the water of mobility and supporting simple HR apps on smartphones.  Is that strategic enough to matter?

In the NFL (national football league) and in college football there is an evolving trend to use a different offensive strategy that involves playing the game at a much quicker pace than is generally played.  This strategy also involves using players with different body types, new formations and plays, and using players with more endurance than is typical.  It is a different way of playing the game and it has proven quite successful.

The football teams that succeed with this new strategy have not just changed one player, or one play, or one formation.  They have developed a whole new philosophy that impacts every part of the organization and strategy from recruiting, to teaching, to workouts, practices, and the way the game is managed and played.  Companies that act "strategically enough to matter" will embrace change in much the same way.  They will recognize how strategically important mobility is and will review all aspects of their business to understand what needs to change to truly matter.

Join us on the webinar - register here.

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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 - 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

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.

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.

Mobile Health News Weekly – Week of December 2, 2012

The Mobile Health News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to mobile health that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting information that reflects market data and trends.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
Also read M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

Massachusetts General Hospital has developed the world's smallest cancer diagnostic system, leveraging a smartphone that has proven to be "game changing technology" for the detection and spot diagnosis of the disease. Read Original Content

Slightly more than half of adults with cell phones have smartphones, and a new report from Pew Internet indicates the mobile health market has increased: one in three cell phone users have used their phone to look for health information. Read Original Content

Three million people in England are set to get access to telehealth by 2017, under government plans to firmly push the NHS into the digital era and become a global leader in the field. Read Original Content

Antenna Software provides a complete cloud-based enterprise mobility suite that enables both IT pros and business executives alike to create and manage mobile apps, websites and content across the entire business.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by Antenna Software.

Recently Spyglass Consulting conducted in-depth interviews with more than 100 nurses to determine smartphone adoption and usage among the group. About 69 percent of the hospitals interviewed for the survey had nursing staff using smartphones on the job that the facility’s IT department were not willing to support on the hospital’s network. Read Original Content

A surgeon in Indiana performed the first operation in the state Tuesday with an iPod-based navigation system that allowed him to check his surgical incisions and decisions, doing more accurate and less invasive work. Read Original Content

A new charge-capture feature in ADP's AdvancedMD iPad app allows doctors' practices to streamline their workflow by tracking billing on a mobile device. Read Original Content

The 2nd Annual HIMSS Mobile Technology Survey, released this week, examines the trend towards the integration of mobile technology in the clinical setting.  Results indicated that 93 percent of physicians use some sort of mobile device daily, and 80 percent use the technology to directly influence and improve patient care. Read Original Content

According to market research firm GlobalData, the worldwide mobile health market will reach $11.8 billion by 2018, up from just $1.2 billion in 2011. Read Original Content