Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

A Digital Transformation Doctrine is Required

In my 30-years in the high tech industry I have often heard the business maxim, “Develop a business strategy first, and then find the technology to support it.” This well-worn business doctrine, I have come to believe in this age of digital transformation, is wrong and it is time to repudiate it.

Let me support my argument by first asking a few questions. What came first e-commerce or the Internet? What came first mobile commerce, or wireless mobile communications? What came first the commercial airline industry or the airplane? What came first armored knights being used as shock troops, or stirrups? Stirrups of course! Technology innovations have a long history of appearing first, and then doctrines evolving slowly later. What we are learning, however, is if your outdated business doctrines are dictating the speed of your technology adoptions - you are in big trouble! The world is moving much too fast and organizations must now align the tempo of their business doctrine evolution with the pace of technology innovations and customer adoptions.

Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the latter than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

Today digital transformations defined as, “Changes across an organization associated with the application of digital technologies,” are happening all around us as a result of technology innovations and fast changing consumer behaviors. These digital transformations, welcomed or not, force new and updated business doctrines if companies are to successfully compete.

Before we move on, let’s define doctrine as, “Fundamental principles by which an organization guides their actions to accomplish their mission.” It is a conceptual framework of knowledge and thought relevant to the environment and times. It provides a common vocabulary for use across organizations. It reflects an aggregated understanding of six key areas:

Who am I?
What are my objectives or missions?
What are my strengths and weaknesses?
What is the nature of my competition?
How do I prepare to compete?
What methods do I employ to compete and win?

I propose organizations today need a “digital transformation” doctrine, a DTD (digital transformation doctrine). Without a DTD, organizations will lack a unified understanding of why they are transforming, and the role transformation plays in helping them compete successfully to achieve their overall objectives.

Doctrine represents and codifies best practice, based on enduring principles, examples from history and validated lessons from experience and operations. An approved set of principles and methods, intended to provide organisations with a common outlook and a uniform basis for action. ~ Professor Richard Holmes, Army Doctrine Primer

As we all know digital technologies do not just enhance and extend existing processes and models, but they open doors to all kinds of new innovations, competitors, businesses processes, strategies and even new industries. An organization’s DTD must be capable of leading them successfully through these massive and accelerating changes. An organization’s DTD should influence all of their strategies, how they operate and the tactics they employee to compete. In our research, we find most companies are experiencing digital transformation, but few have a recognized doctrine to lead them on this digital transformation journey.

A useful example of a DTD is, "Ensure competitive advantages in your defined marketplaces through information dominance and by employing superior data collection, analysis and information logistics systems, which provide full situational awareness, support data-driven decision-making, automated algorithms and enable the delivery of real-time contextually relevant insights and personalized digital user experiences." ~ Kevin Benedict

Read more on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

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

Digital Transformation - A Revolution in Precision Through IoT, Mobility and Analytics

Fog of War

Sensors allow us to digitally monitor our physical world, and take real-time action on the data from afar. Plant managers, in fact, can manage multiple manufacturing locations around the world in real-time via sensors and Internet connectivity. Drone pilots in the Nevada desert; project military force by flying combat missions around the world via sensors and remote control. Trucking companies can track and manage, via telematics, thousands of trucks, trailers and their cargo all across the country in real-time. As automation increases due to advances in sensors, bandwidth, artificial intelligence, algorithms and machine learning - precision becomes not only possible, but also all-important.

The “fog of war” describes a chaotic and competitive environment filled with unknowns, uncertainty and imprecise data. In a not so distant past, military leaders suffering in the "fog of war," desperately sought answers to four key questions:

Where are my enemies?
Where are my friends?
Where are my forces?
What are their strengths?

These unknowns and uncertainties impacted the strategies and tactics military leaders employed. Their focus, and many of their resources, were dedicated to defending against the unknown. Today mobile apps, sensors and analytics are reducing the “fog of war” in many industries and markets by making more of it “known.” How then is the revolution in precision transforming businesses and strategies today?

Many companies have not evolved from antiquated business models based on the “unknown and imprecise”, and continue to throw good money after bad by following "estimate-based" models. Sears’ reported this quarter that their sales decreased, and on-hand inventories increased. These numbers seem to reflect an estimate-based model lacking precise market knowledge.

Many companies continue to follow old school estimate-based models and business case studies that don’t incorporate the availability of massive quantities of real-time data available today. They have yet to change their strategies and tactics to support the new precision models.

The retailer Macy’s, is also facing a challenging quarter. In response they announced a new business strategy focusing on individual customers and personalizing their experiences (read more on personalization in Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me). In the past Macy’s focused on selecting inventory and marketing to “regions,” not “individuals." Macy’s regional approach highlights the challenge many companies face exploiting precision data. Edward Deming, the father of quality improvement, once said, “The big problems are where people don't realize they have one in the first place.” But in this case it seems Macy’s recognized the problem.

Mass marketing to regions is the antithesis of precision. It is an “estimate-based” strategy formulated in a time when there was inprecise data. It is not a strategy for today.

Ignoring today’s “revolution in precision” is like a manufacturer ignoring the “continuous quality improvement” (CQI) movement over the past 60 years. CQI is the process-based, data-driven approach to improving the quality of a product or service. It operates under the premise there is always room for improving operations, processes, and activities to increase quality. CQI teaches the importance of measuring everything and working with precise data to document reality and to recognize progress. The American automobile industry tried ignoring CQI for many years and suffered the consequences, while the Japanese auto industry excelled at quality. In another classic quote from Edward Deming, he said, “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” Taking advantage of precision is a must if surviving is in your plan.

The revolution in precision we are experiencing today is the result of our ability to precisely measure, in real-time, all kinds of new things that impact our business as a result of the Internet, mobile devices and connected sensors. These developments make precise data available from all corners of the globe in real-time. Precise data today makes traditional estimate-based business models, strategies and tactics obsolete.

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Watch my latest video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi1GJC_1Ddk&feature=youtu.be
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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

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Competing in Digital Transformation and Mobility

The C suite must understand the battle they are fighting before they can develop and implement a winning digital transformation strategy. The commercial battlefield is data, and the effectiveness and speed of competitors’ information logistics systems will make all the difference. The C suite’s overall doctrine must be achieving information dominance in their target markets.

Information, however, is trivia unless it results in correct insights, which leads to right actions at the right time. In the book, The Principles of War for the Information Age, author Robert Leonard writes, “If I can develop and pursue my plan to defeat you faster than you can execute your plan to defeat me, then your plan is unimportant.” It’s not the ability to collect more data faster, or analyze it faster, it is the ability to understand and act on it faster. Businesses that can “understand and act with speed” will dominate those which are slower.

In mobile commerce, the ability to identify the mobile app user, recognize their preferences, understand the immediate context, and then to provide a personalized and contextually relevant experience fast enough to satisfy impatient mobile consumers is the winning formula. That is a difficult job, but offers competitive advantage opportunities! So the question is how can I achieve those competitive advantages?

The C suite must recognize speed advantages in information logistic systems; analytics, business operational tempos and decision-making will determine the winners of tomorrow’s digital era. Competition is now focused on optimizing information logistics systems (ILS). ILSs are all the systems involved in John Boyd’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide and act). They include the following tasks:

Collecting data
Transmitting data
Securing data
Normalizing data
Storing data
Analyzing and reporting on the data
Understanding the meaning and impact of the data
Driving decisions based on the meaning of the data
Acting on the data (manual or automated) to achieve competitive advantages

Achieving speed in the first six steps can mostly be accomplished with technology upgrades and improvements, but in order to achieve speed in steps 7-9, it requires deep thinking that is codified in algorithms supported by automation. It requires augmenting humans with artificial intelligence, sophisticated algorithm-driven intelligent process automation (robotic software processes), and machine learning.

To achieve competitive advantages and speed in these steps requires an enterprise to move beyond “human time” and into the realm of “digital time.” Digital time can only be achieved with the augmentation of robotic software processes that work far faster than humanly possible. When your mobile app is accessed by millions of users and the numbers of data transactions explode, supporting those apps in real-time requires automation and augmentation, i.e. algorithms.

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Kevin Benedict

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Digital Transformation and Mobility - Macro-Forces and Timing

Economies are changing. Industries are changing. Markets are changing. Consumers are changing and shopping differently. As competitive advantages evolve into market standards, areas of competition move. Today we see fields of competition move to data utilization and digital transformation initiatives. When considering how your company needs to digitally transform, there are three very important questions to ask:

How am I defining digital transformation?
What is motivating me to digitally transform?
Why should I digitally transform now?

As a definition for digital transformation I use - rethinking, redesigning and restructuring technology and business models to more quickly and effectively respond to and engage employees, partners and customers in digital environments.

To answer the questions about motivation, I propose there are eight key forces at work today that are motivating digital transformation:

Real-time mobile apps and data
Real-time sensor data (IoT)
Real-time analytics
Real-time situational awareness
Real-time business operational tempos
Real-time intelligent process automation
Real-time contextual understanding
Real-time personalization of user experiences

There is an obvious theme here, “real-time.” Real-time, as a mainstream requirement, first gained importance with the advent of the Internet and e-commerce, and then exponentially increased in importance when mobile devices connected to the Internet. Today mobile commerce represents 34% of the global e-commerce market, but by 2018 it is expected to represent 47% and these consumers are impatient. These consumers are mobile, and the context of their mobile searches and app usage changes second by second as they move throughout their day. Real-time context is key to a successful user experience in this environment, and businesses with consumer facing mobile apps need to be moving toward real-time now. That is not easy.

As competition increases and the sophistication of mobile apps grow, so also does consumer expectations. Today mobile apps needed to be personalized in real-time, contextually relevant, and mobile payments and wallets supported. These requirements break IT. Traditional IT environments are not meant for such speeds. Business processes are not designed for real-time operational tempos. Humans are not capable of scaling up to process, analyze and understand millions of data transactions daily.

As businesses recognize “real-time” requirements are not going away, and that “real-time” is mandatory to compete, they must take inventory of their existing IT environments and take the necessary steps to digitally transform.

Today’s competition takes place around data and speed. The winners of a digital tomorrow will invest in five key areas:

becoming a data-driven business
improving the quality and speed of their information logistics systems
achieving real-time operational tempos
redesigning and rearchitecting for business agility
utilizing real-time contextually relevant data to personalize digital user experiences

Businesses must recognize the demand for real-time operational tempos is only going to increase and this requires strategy, action and a budget.

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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Analyst and World Traveler

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Fast Tempos and Digital Transformation

“What matters most is the tempo of change.” ~ John Boyd

Few businesses would argue that data collection and analytics are not important to their current and future success. Data can provide situational awareness, enhanced customer service and more personalized experiences. It also supports vigilance and the ability to recognize both problems and opportunities early. The problem, however, is not many enterprises can act on the data fast enough to matter.

In most companies, organizational structures, decision-making processes, business models and business cultures aren’t nimble enough to change at a tempo fast enough to capture competitive opportunities and respond to challenges. In today’s world of digital transformation and fast changing mobile and online consumer behaviors (see Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me), businesses must be as nimble as their customers, or they risk losing market share to a nimbler competitor.

The First Law of Thermodynamics states, "energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed.” In a business context that means if energy is being used to resist change, then it is not available for making change. Change is difficult. The default mode for most organizations and people is to resist change. In order to overcome this resistance, a new reality must be created.

Companies need to transform in order to minimize resistance and reward behaviors and environments that support a fast tempo of change. Companies that can support a fast tempo of change have a big competitive advantage, while those that can’t risk obsolescence.

The military strategist John Boyd found some fighter planes with poorer performance numbers on paper were actually better in competition because they could transition at a faster tempo. The ability to change directions quickly trumped speed and performance. There are lessons there for businesses.

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Kevin Benedict

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Mobile and IoT Technologies are Inside the Curve of Human Time

We humans have a finite speed at which we can think, analyze and make decisions. We can only focus on a small set of data before we are overwhelmed. When important decisions must be made, our brains need time, significant time, to weigh all the variables, pros and cons and possible outcomes in order to arrive at a good decision. In times of high stress where making fast decisions is required, many of us don’t perform at our peak. In addition, weak humans that we are - need sleep. We are not always available; we require daily downtime in order to function.

Humans operate in human time, a biological time influenced by the environment and universe that we live in. Computers, though, are not subject to these human limitations and can act on algorithms and pre-determined decision trees 24/7 in milliseconds.

Human time challenges and limitations are not going away. As IoT sensors and mobile devices proliferate, so also does the volume of real-time data and required analysis. Humans, already at their limit, must somehow augment their capabilities to handle the massive increases in the volume and complexity of data. Many believe, as do I, that the competitive marketplaces of today and tomorrow will be won by those with better and faster information logistics systems. Systems that can collect larger quantities of data, analyze and execute relevant actions faster.

The new F-35 fighter jet in the USA’s arsenal has over 24 million lines of software code running it. Why? It requires sensors, computers and sofware just to keep it in the air. Code is required to process all the data fast enough to augment the pilot’s skills. In addition, the F-35 comes with a $500,000 custom helmet that provides a 360-degree view of the operational environment, and displays so much data pilots have reported suffering dizziness from information overload. We have hit the wall of human capabilities, and we are only getting started.

The late military strategist and US Air force Colonel John Boyd, taught a key advantage in air combat was to get “inside” an opponent's decision curve. That means to understand the true situation faster, and then make better decisions quicker than an opponent. He taught that humans need a simple formula for quick thinking. His formula was OODA (observe, orient, decide and act). He taught a continuous cycle of observing a situation, orienting or understanding it, deciding what needs to happen and then acting quickly. He taught that competitors executing OODA cycles faster than opponents had the advantage. The OODA quick thinking process is proven, and has now made the leap from human time to computer time via artificial intelligence.

The leap from human time to computer time has relevance in business today, especially in the age of Mobile Me, where consumer’s expectations for mobile app performances demand instant responses. Mobile apps and real-time consumer interactions are now in the realm of the F-35. Consumers today demand more real-time information processing, decision-making and business process execution than are humanly possible without computer and software augmentation operating beyond the limitations of human time, and into the future of computer time.

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Watch my latest video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uF2ntnskHA&feature=youtu.be.

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Kevin Benedict

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The Role of Sensors, Real-Time BI, Big Data and Personalization in Mobile Commerce: The Report and the Video

I just completed a video that accompanies my latest research on mobile consumer behaviors, and the strategies retailers must implement. If you design, develop or deploy customer facing apps, this content is relevant and important.

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Kevin Benedict

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Human Thinking vs Technology - Digital Intrusions

In a world filled with millions of instances of hyper-stimulating digital content - thinking, learning and the development of intellectual assets suffer. In a recent article I authored titled, It’sTime to Make Technology Disappear, I shared that technology has increasingly become a hindrance to my thinking, a distraction to thoughtful, productive work. I love technology, but it has reached the point where it has overwhelmed my senses, and I doubt I am the only one.

Thoughtful thinking, and by that I mean thinking that utilizes analysis, comparisons, judgment, creativity, planning, forecasting and imagining requires dedicated time to ponder, formulate and connect ideas and thoughts. These activities require a mental focus void of interruptions.

I had the opportunity to manage teams of programmers for many years. You quickly learn that quality programming requires dedicated time absent from distraction. I read once that programmers, if interrupted, take 20 minutes to fully return to the level of mental concentration they had before interruption. This is one of many reasons I turn off nearly all sound and visual alerts on my laptop and mobile devices. It is hard enough focusing my own brain for long periods of time, let alone being bombarded by digital distractions.

In our personal multi-screen lives filled with alerts, notifications, reminders, news flashes, advertisements and 24x7 communications via smartphones and social media, it is easy to lose the storyline we each want for our own lives. Our personal storyline is our past, present and future. It is the story we want our lives to tell. Recognizing our past storyline, determining how we want to change, and then ensuring we are taking the necessary steps to live it, takes focused thinking and time – all things we quickly lose under the onslaught of digital glimpses and instances.

In our professional lives we often have specific and routine deliverables, plus the increasing request to help our employers innovate, create, invent and digitally transform. Our routine deliverables and tasks often benefit greatly from technology that improves productivity (and by the way can often be done by robots), but unless we can “make technology disappear” into the background, it inhibits our human ability to think thoughtfully about important future business and digital transformation issues. If we are to claim and protect our humanity amongst all of the digital distractions, we are going to need to figure out a way to control both our technologies and ourselves.

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Kevin Benedict

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It's Time for Technology to Disappear

In 2015, technology reached the tipping point for me, it moved from the efficient column, to the inefficient column, from a pro to a con, from a help to a hindrance. You can hear it in every complaint about how email messages are overwhelming our day, interfering with priorities, impacting our schedules, hurting our productivity and forcing more of us to take our work home at night and over the weekend.

In 2016, technology needs to disappear into the background, while productivity and purpose should be the siren's call. We have approximately 700,000 hours between our birth and our death. About 350,000 of those hours are spent in our careers. How many of those hours do we want to waste on poor technology experiences? I propose the following technologies must disappear, and by disappear I mean fade into the background:

We shouldn’t have to read through hundreds of useless email messages to find the three necessary to complete our job. Communications need to change and email must disappear behind a veil of utility and productivity.
We shouldn’t have to check dozens of different locations, apps and websites to communicate with our work colleagues and friends. All of these various collaboration and communication platforms need to disappear into a consolidated and efficient aggregated solution like Slack.
Communication technologies should disappear into the background, and the quality and utility of the message improved by technologies.
Email and meeting driven schedules must disappear, in favor of schedules that honor purpose and deliverables. This may mean prioritizing thinking time and mental productivity. Scientists agree that the creative parts of our minds work better at different times of the day. Those times need to be reserved, blocked and honored on schedules, to optimize their utility.
The requirement to develop, store and retrieve dozens of different passwords and user names must disappear. The ability to accurately authenticate a user must become more efficient and secure.
Trivial messages and alerts from hundreds of different sources arriving 24 hours a day must disappear. Trivial messages and an urge to immediately respond must not be allowed to negatively impact our thinking, creating, planning, sleeping, loving, relationship building, driving and the handling of dangerous equipment.
On-premise IT solutions, hardware and apps that serve to distract from the business, and offer no additional business value, competitive advantages or market agility must disappear into the cloud.
The 200+ mobile applications on my iPhone must disappear into an artificial intelligence engine (think advanced Siri) that will access their functionality and assist me even before I ask.
Mobile applications that are not personalized, and are not contextually relevant should disappear. I don’t care what you sell, if I am not interested, or it is not relevant to me, I don't want to see it.
The routine process work I do on my computer must go away. Intelligent process automation should be pushed down to individuals. An AMX mobile app should process my expenses without me. It should only alert me to exceptions, not the routine.
Everyone agrees that ideas, creativity and innovation are critical to the success of businesses, but technologies today are more often a hindrance than help in these efforts. Technologies and the use of technologies that hinder creativity and innovation must disappear.

In the lifecycle of technologies, there is a time when users are enthralled and distracted by the technology itself, we are there today, but these times must quickly pass and the technology must disappear into the background. In the year 2016, it should be all about making 2015’s technology disappear.

The challenge with making technology disappear, is it is hard, time consuming and expensive. Adding a layer of artificial intelligence, that can analyze data, understand context and personalize an experience is complex and hard, but that is how technology disappears.
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Kevin Benedict

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Time, Speed and Space - Mobile vs. Static Apps

Most of today’s technology was designed and developed for static, stationary environments. Even today, in a mobile world, mobile apps are most often developed based on assumed static endpoints. Why is that a problem? We are rarely static people.

Let’s consider two people in a vehicle. The driver, assuming they use their smartphone only when safely parked, searches for places, locations and directions based on a static starting point. However, if the person searching for places, locations and directions is a passenger in a moving car, a different set of information is appropriate. One based on movement, speed, direction, intersections, changing distances, etc. How should those variables change the way mobile apps are designed?

If you want to meet up with friends or family members who are travelling, in transit, or commuting, today’s mobile apps require you to select a stationary physical address in order to provide a map and direction. Mobile apps designed with static assumptions are not going to help you coordinate an intersection point based on time, space and speed. What if you want to meet as soon as possible to exchange children after a soccer game? Today’s apps are not going to help.

What if you want to meet up with a mobile business? Someone who sells handmade jewelry or crafts at different locations everyday? Wouldn’t it be useful to search and find a real-time and accurate address, rather than a static, out of date, physical address?

If you are working outdoors, or in a hardhat industry, you will often need to coordinate with contractors and subcontractors bringing specialized equipment and materials to a jobsite. Often these moving parts must all come together at once in order to complete a project. Wouldn’t it be useful if your project management software were using real-time dynamic information (GPS, IoT sensors, mobile apps, etc.) that utilized real-world times, space and speeds to update schedules dynamically?

Calendars apps assume static locations and times, but is that how the real world works? What if we assumed constant motion, changing variables, obstacles and dynamic schedules? You know, like in the real world. How would your mobile calendar apps behave differently?

A transformation in thinking and design needs to take place, one based on the real world, rather than on static models.
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Kevin Benedict

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My Best Articles on Mobile Commerce Strategies 2015

In 2015, a master strategy for mobile commerce emerged. Mobile apps need to be personalized, but that is not enough. Personalization without context, relevance, value to the customer and permission is just creepy and/or obnoxious. We recognized a new kind of partnership is required between customers and trusted vendors. One that requires a deeper level of earned trust, and one that provides mutual benefits through the sharing of data. We call this relationship a MME Data Partnership.

Parts of MME Data Partnerships can be found within many existing loyalty and rewards programs. Although the purpose is rarely understood. These programs define how the collection and use of specific data will be used to provide mutual benefits. It is an overt agreement by both parties to share and use data in return for defined rewards. Within a MME Data Partnership we found three types of data, we call 3D-Me, are needed to optimize a mobile user experience:

Digital data - online and mobile activities and behaviors
Physical data - Sensor and IoT
Personal data - MME Data Partnerships

For each of these categories purposeful strategies need to be developed and implemented to collect, analyze and utilize the data in order to provide the best experiences for customers.

Personalization, as we have learned, is not enough. Personalization needs to be combined with CROME Triggers (contextually relevant opportunities, moments and environments), which are bits of data that when collected and analyzed in real-time, identify the need for specific and relevant personalized content.

All of these strategies and more are discussed in "The Best of Mobile Commerce 2015" articles listed below:

Download the full report, "Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me" here: http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/Cutting-Through-Chaos-in-the-Age-of-Mobile-Me-codex1579.pdf.

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Kevin Benedict

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Instantly Personalizing Mobile Apps - Cutting Through Chaos

Unique Consumers and Unique Profiles

Smartphones, laptops, PCs and in-store visits have made path-to-purchase journeys very complex and confusing for online retailers to recognize and support. Consumers can search and discover products and services using a smartphone on their way to work. In the evening they can pull out a tablet and engage in immersive research while laying in bed. They may decide to review some more on their desktop at work, then at lunch time stop at a brick and mortar store to look at the product in more detail. That evening, they purchase the product online using a laptop. How is a retailer or e-tailer going to cut through this chaos and recognize individual consumers and their needs along their path-to-purchase journey?

In our research at Cognizant's "Center for the Future of Work" we found online shoppers use different devices for different categories of products. In fact, 56% of online shoppers use multiple devices on many online path-to-purchase journeys. On the go search and discovery is often initiated on smartphones, immerse research on tablets, while completing transactions on laptops is a common pattern.

Some products consumers are comfortable purchasing on a smartphone, others not. We found online shoppers of different ages exhibit markedly different shopping behaviors. We found significantly different online shopping behaviors between those with different education levels, genders, ethnicity and technology preferences (laptop/desktop vs. mobile).

Our findings reveal these variables, all added up, equate to thousands, if not millions of different combinations of needs, preferences, unique activities and behaviors. These unique set of variables we call Mobile Me Profiles (MME-Ps), require different personalized content, at different times and locations, for each consumer in order to provide an optimal experience. In this age of "mobile me" where customers demand personalized and relevant user experiences, it is necessary to identify these differences, precisely and instantly.

If you are going to compete and win in mobile commerce today, you must target markets of one. It is no longer an effective strategy to treat your customers as one homogeneous market of unknown consumers. In today's world of mobile commerce, where devices are intimate extensions of unique individuals, knowing those individuals, as individuals is key.

Read more on how to deliver these strategies in my new report, "Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me."

Download the report here http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/Cutting-Through-Chaos-in-the-Age-of-Mobile-Me-codex1579.pdf.

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Kevin Benedict

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Mobile Technologies Revealed: Web and Native App Development Strategies

Our resident Cognizant mobile and digital technology guru, Peter Rogers, shares his insights into web and native app development strategies in this guest post: Enjoy!
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Peter Rogers

I often meet customers who want to transition web developers into mobile application developers. Apple has clearly tried to address this market using Swift but that does not offer a cross platform solution. Developers who have come through this transition will traditionally wrap the latest and greatest web framework (like Angular 2 or React) using Adobe Cordova through initiatives like Ionic. However great the latest web frameworks are though they can never compete with pure native mobile user interfaces powered by dedicated hardware acceleration. It may be a simple solution but the net result is never going to be present the best possible user experience and there will always be problems with Apple App Store submission and changes to WebView technologies designed to gently nudge developers towards pure native Apps.

Appcelerator Titanium has long since offered an excellent solution in this space but the only downside is the lack of a combined desktop and mobile solution.

Recently three new exciting initiatives arrived to offer new Titanium-like solutions in this space:

1. React Native (http://www.reactnative.com/)
2. Angular 2 Native Apps (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SbiiyRSIwo)
3. NativeScript (https://www.nativescript.org/)

The benefit of the first two is that the technology can be shared across both mobile and desktop effectively. There is no learning a new framework. For the web developers who are trained in Angular 2 or React then this is a very attractive solution for transition to mobile development without having to go anywhere near Cordova. In fact in most cases all you have to do is to swap out the final Cordova Wrapping process for a dedicated Web Native Development phase, which means you don’t have to throw anything away.

How does this magic work? Well advanced web developers have already started to mix Angular and React: using the big framework quality of Angular and the high speed rendering of React. This architecture is made even simpler with Angular 2 in which there is platform-agnostic template parsing and platform-specific rendering. This makes it possible to plug in React Native or NativeScript as the underlying rendering engine. This offers a future in which Angular 2 can create cross-platform desktop or cross-platform mobile applications, allowing you to choose your programming language (ECMAScript 5.1, ECMAScript 2015, TypeScript, Dart or CoffeeScript) and choose your platform-specific rendering engine (React Native, NativeScript, Angular 1, Angular 2 or React). For those who wrote off Angular 2 due to radical design changes then suddenly that decision is looking incredible hasty, for it is nothing short of genius.

If you watch the Angular 2 Native App video then you will see the focus around NativeScript. The question is why not consider Titanium or React Native? Whilst that is perfectly possible using the plug and play nature of the new Angular 2 rendering engine there is a clear advantage offered by NativeScript. To understand this advantage we need to take a slight diversion into Hybrid App world. As you may recall there are three main models for Hybrid Apps: wrapped web; runtime interpreters; and cross-compilers. If we start with cross-compilers then we will find Xamarin ruling the roost but I would not call this a Rapid Application Development approach. You trade performance for a slightly longer development time and a more difficult programming language. The interesting thing with Xamarin is the 100% API coverage available within a few days. There are also a few HTML 5 canvas cross-compilers like those found in Intel XDK but these are specific to Canvas technology which works better for the specific use case of widgets and games. We all know the most popular wrapped web solution is Cordova, with another notable entry being IBM Worklight.

Runtime Interpreter solutions do not quite offer the performance of a cross-compiler but they do offer support for rapid application development through JavaScript. Appcelerator Titanium is the most popular Runtime Interpreter solution and has teased a cross-compiler solution called HyperLoop for a long time but it is offered in a restricted capacity. I am a huge fan of Titanium and have used it a lot for various customers. I was really looking forward to HyperLoop but looking at the software repository then it seems to have slowed down to a halt. The only downside of Titanium is the lack of 100% API coverage but this is a shared limitation with most other portable native solutions with Xamarin and NativeScript being the notable alternatives. Now in the case of Xamarin the API wiring has to be performed by hand however in NativeScript then it is automatic.

So what is the magic of the Runtime Interpreter solution powering Titanium, Kony, React Native and NativeScript? Well Telerik (who created NativeScript) provide the best explanation that I have quite possibly ever read before online (http://developer.telerik.com/featured/nativescript-works/). In a nutshell the two core JavaScript engines that power iOS (JavaScript Core) and Android (V8) both expose a very advanced set of APIs that power the JavaScript bridge (http://izs.me/v8-docs/namespacev8.html).

· Inject new objects into the global namespace
· JavaScript function callbacks
· JNI to talk with the C layer on Android

NativeScript offers the following explanation of how it uses these APIs in order to build the JavaScript bridge:

1) Metadata is injected into the global namespace at build-time
2) The V8/JavaScript Core function callback runs.
3) The NativeScript runtime uses its metadata to know that the JavaScript function calls means it needs to instantiate an Android/iOS native object
4) The NativeScript runtime uses the JNI to instantiate an Android object and keeps a reference to it (iOS can talk directly to the C layer)
5) The NativeScript runtime returns a JavaScript object that proxies the Android/iOS object.
6) Control returns to JavaScript where the proxy object gets stored as a local variable.

This is probably quite similar for most of the other vendors but the additional step that NativeScript adds is the ability to dynamically build the API set at build time using Reflection (introspection). Because generating this data is non-trivial from a performance perspective, NativeScript does it ahead of time, and embeds the pre-generated metadata during the Android/iOS build step. This is why NativeScript can offer 100% API coverage immediately because it does not involve the manual step required in Xamarin. To be accurate it is unlikely that NativeScript can offer 100% API but instead it will offer all of the APIs that can be discovered through reflection – there is a subtle difference here as those who have use reflection programmatically will pick up on.

NativeScript offers two different modes of operation:

1) Use the low level iOS and Android objects directly
2) Use high level abstraction APIs

The high level abstraction APIs are provided as RequireJS modules and allow you to work at a higher level of abstraction. If you were wiring this into Angular 2 then you would probably have an Angular component which either calls a Browser Object or an NS Module, which itself talks to either an iOS proxy object or an Android proxy object through NativeScript. Of course there is nothing to stop you having an Angular component that calls out to React Native and that option is being explored as well.

This is not to say that NativeScript is better than React Native, Titanium or Xamarin. In fact I can see the main use case of NativeScript as being used inside of Angular 2 as its platform specific rendering solution. I can actually see more people using React Native as a standalone solution even though it is in a much earlier state. I can also see Titanium carrying on as one of the most popular mobile solutions on the market today. I can however see native mobile web applications becoming a hot new topic and a great place to transition web developers towards.

Download the latest mobile strategies research paper, "Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me," here http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/Cutting-Through-Chaos-in-the-Age-of-Mobile-Me-codex1579.pdf
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Kevin Benedict

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Latest Research on Mobile Consumer Behaviors and Mobile App Requirements

I just finished a major research paper titled, "Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me." Our findings reveal current mobile consumer behaviors, the challenges in creating mobile apps for them, and specific recommendations and business strategies for winning in an age of "Mobile Me." Download the full report here http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/Cutting-Through-Chaos-in-the-Age-of-Mobile-Me-codex1579.pdf.

Video Link: https://youtu.be/IqN6NbY_Q0A
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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Analyst and World Traveler

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