Mobile Expert Video Series: DSI's Dave Edeal

This week I am in Chicago speaking on mobile strategies and trends.  While in Chicago I was able to interview DSI Global's Partner Manager, Dave Edeal.  In this interview we discuss mobile trends, Oracle and mobility in manufacturing.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://youtu.be/BVuy6GGLuqs

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

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Learn about mobile strategies at 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, Code Halos and the Good, Bad and Ugly of Tracking Data

As a SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) Analyst, I spend my days researching, writing and presenting ideas to companies and audiences.  One of the most important subjects these days is how to develop and implement the best possible information logistics systems.  That means utilizing and processing collected data in the most advantageous and efficient manner possible to further the ambitions of the business.  That goal is perfectly understandable for a business - collecting business data and transactional data is expected, but when it is your personal data (Code Halos) that is being collected we often feel differently.  For example, I love having my TripIt, Marriott and Delta mobile apps know about me, my preferences and my past, present and future travels, but I don't want that information shared with other vendors (or home burglars) without my permission.

In this article, my colleague Ben Pring, Co-Director of the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant is kind enough to address the good and bad of having your data (Code Halos) aggregated and tracked online.  I have included two embedded videos - first, a video interview that I filmed with Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring on the concepts of Code Halos, and a second far more professional clip on the role of Code Halos in our everyday life.

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The response to our articles around Code Halo-thinking is overwhelmingly positive.   I and my co-authors, Malcolm Frank and Paul Roehrig, have spoken at dozens of client and industry events and engaged in numerous post-presentation discussions with a wide array of  senior IT and business leaders who when presented with  the Code Halo idea and follow us through our Crossroads Model tell us of  the opportunities Code Halo-thinking offers (including the risks of “extinction events”) are very real in their industry or market.  For  example, the narrative resonated with a major soft drink manufacturer that saw a new way to think about the social network around its soft drink; with an international airline which is beginning to socialize and internalize the new metaphor of a Code Halo to rethink how it moves customers from point A to point B; and with a leading financial services institution that admitted it was  only too aware of the “ionization” happening all around it as new ideas from start-ups begin to change the competitive dynamics the company faces.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/ctycYs18dyk

The second major reaction though – which may or may not surprise you, if you’ve read any of the previous pieces here, is that many people immediately internalize the Code Halo story and find “the dark side of the Halo.” Rather than focusing on the positive transformational commercial opportunities Code Halos  present, they land on the dystopian, Orwellian world of constant surveillance by Big (and little) Brother that Messer’s Assange, Manning and Snowden have brought to the fore in recent weeks, months and years.

Typically we hear a torrent of worst-case scenarios. “I don’t want to share my information with retailer x”, “I don’t want the government to have even more information on me that they do already”, “this is just going to make hackers’ lives easier”, “I get bombarded by enough advertising already; this is just going to make it even worse”, “I don’t want to live in 1984”, “I am not a number”, “how can I control who knows things about me”, “this is the final nail in the coffin of privacy”, “these ideas will never take off.”

The prism that people have is perfectly understandable.  Their concerns and fears are, of course, entirely valid and understandable. We share many of them. As digital immigrants ourselves we are at times as dazed and confused as any set of middle aged men by the emergent and volatile social mores of the new world and have to fight back the temptation to wallow in nostalgic revelries of how “this wasn’t the way we used to do it back in the day/old country.”

The grand experiment that we are all engaged in – creating a world of unprecedented hyper-connectivity of time, space, and culture - which the Code Halo phenomena is supercharging, is, by its very nature, unknowable and logically contains good things and bad.  Lots of good things are going to happen in a world of Code Halos, as are lots of bad things.

In short, we have no intention to deny that bad things will happen as a result of code meeting code. We fully expect they will. There is a very real dark side of the halo. All of the worst-case scenarios with which we are presented will happen, and are happening now.  People will get hacked. Government intrusion will grow. Advertisers will create new ways to embed advertising into every nook and cranny of our lives through every IP addressable form factor we use. Privacy will recede. The nefarious will have new opportunities to hurt us. Many innovations enabled by Code Halos will have unexpected consequences which will compound over time to produce unanticipated negative outcomes.  And yet we firmly believe these fears, concerns and objections are overblown, irrelevant or moot. Every objection is entirely the same objection that people raised as Al Gore’s Information Superhighway was entering the public consciousness in the middle of the 1990s; “I’ll never put my credit details onto the web,” Average Joe said in 1996; now Joe is routinely spending thousands of dollars online.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/XYwiDJ7UWHo

The Internet has been a crime scene in the last 20 years -- repeatedly. And it still is. And it always will be. But, today the Internet has 634 million websites and 2.4 billion users, according to uptime monitoring company, Royal Pingdom, and is here to stay. Nobody is going to un-invent it.

In 2013 so much of our lives are already online – shared, visible, transparent, open, all proffered voluntarily through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, et al, or less voluntarily via our credit score, phone records, movements, and key strokes that the government can impound without warrant -- that privacy is already an illusion, hackers already hack, advertisers can already advertise within our email, pharmacies already send our 16-year-old daughters coupons for diapers when neither they nor we knew they were pregnant; we are numbers, we are code.

The world that we are describing is already here. The Code Halo era is not imminent. It is now.

Just as the upside of the Internet has won over the downside we believe the upside of a Code Halo world will win over its downsides. The “give to get” ratio of the Code Halo world will be so positive that, in the same way that the cost and convenience of Internet era 1.0 triumphed over its doubters, the new Internet era of Code Halos will similarly see it detractor’s voices diminish and disappear.  

And one last thought; the ultimate value of Code Halos will originate out of the openness of data that is shared and this, of course, will mandate good behavior and accountability.  Just as lousy service that once went unpunished is now broadcast on social media with sometimes devastating impact, individuals or corporations that misuse or exploit information exchanged via Code Halos will struggle to enrich and inflate their Code Halo and to generate commercially material sparks. Bad Code Halo behavior will exist in a world of instant high visibility and will push some towards their extinction event. 

Thoughts?  

For more information on these concepts please visit www.unevenlydistributed.com.

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at 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 Saving Money by Implementing Enterprise Mobility

In this short video, recorded last week in Sydney, Australia, I discuss how investing in enterprise mobility solutions can save you money and capture more sales. Enjoy!

Video Link: http://youtu.be/WFU627n98ag

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at 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 Expert Video Series: Digivizer's CEO Emma Lo Russo

I had the good fortune to participate on two panels with Emma Lo Russo, CEO and SMAC expert at Digivizer yesterday at the Cognizant Community Sydney 2013 event.  Digivizer's mission is to deliver the digital footprint of the people you know and the people you really should know.  I find the topic of digital footprints incredibly interesting, and hope you do as well!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDWoQ7U3u0&feature=share&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw

*************************************************************

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at 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 Expert Video Series: Damien Moriarty

I am in Sydney, Australia speaking at the Cognizant Community Sydney 2013 conference and meeting with companies and SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) experts this week.  In this short video, I interview veteran mobility expert and International Delivery Manager for Retriever Communications, Damien Moriarty about how their roots in industrial grade mobility give them a unique approach to mobility.

Keep your ears open for the unique way Australian children's voices can carry throughout an entire hotel.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/jB32iQC9Etc

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at 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.

Digital Transformations - The Crossroads Model: Winning with Code Halos

Books and Reviews

Three of my colleagues here at Cognizant, Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring, are writing a new book on the subjects of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud), digital and business transformations, and successful strategies for navigating through them.  The concepts in this book resonate with me.  I see enterprise mobility and B2C mobile app strategies as key components.  In this article, we get a sneak preview from the book.  

Several weeks ago we outlined the concept  of “Code Halos™” – aka our digital fingerprint – and discussed how   “personal” Code Halos are migrating into enterprise computing. We also analyzed the areas in which “organizational” Code Halos are changing what businesses do and how they do it.

In this post we advocate how Code Halos create a repeatable pattern of disruption across a wide range of industries; by studying this pattern we have developed a business model – the Crossroads Model™ – to help business and technology leaders understand the impact Code Halos have on winning and losing in today’s fast digitizing global markets. We also provide a “playbook” for executives to win in the new “code rush” and avoid the “extinction events” that so many once great corporations, from Kodak to Newsweek, have experienced in recent years.

A New Prism for Understanding Digital Disruption Has Emerged 

In studying the rise and impact of Code Halos, we’ve recognize that vast industry transformations – and the resulting violent value migrations – in books, movie rentals, mobile phones, insurance, consumer goods, newspapers and travel services have all followed a similar pattern. This pattern is what we call the Crossroads Model. As companies and industries have experienced events explained by the Crossroads Model, three key events have occurred.

• The winners built Code Halos at an “atomic” level — oriented around people, processes, products and organizations — to create new value and experiences. The losers largely ignored the possibilities of deriving meaning from data, customer intimacy and the value of code, and instead continued to work on creating economic value primarily through the leverage of physical assets.
• Once Code Halos formed and grew in value with more data, they led to industry transformations that followed a very consistent pattern. Each industry shift has particular distinctions — whether in timing or the formation of particular Code Halos — but in each case, roughly 80% of the same model has remained consistent.
• The shift happened quickly. Once these trends were underway, the industry landscape shifted very quickly; there was almost no way back for companies that overlooked opportunities leading up to their particular Crossroads decision.

The Crossroads Model consists of five key stages:

• Ionization: A fertile context for innovation. The combination of changing economic pressures, enhanced customer expecta¬tions and new technologies creates a context and environment for the establishment of Code Halos and related new business models.
• The Spark: Where Code Halos collide and business changes. Once Code Halos emerge, associated algorithms are then developed. New ideas and offerings are then formed, based on the intersection of Code Halos. An innovative “Spark” then quickly reshapes processes inside the enterprise, as well as at the customer interface.
• Enrichment: Turning a Spark into a blaze. This is the period where Code Halos — if created and managed correctly — grow in both the numbers of users and the value of data by orders of magnitude, giving rise to new products, processes and models for value creation.
• The Crossroads: Where markets flip. This is a compressed period of time — often between one and three years — where industry leadership shifts. At the Crossroads, Code Halos have reached critical mass and are creating new customer expectations and economic models. This drives a rapid, sometimes violent, swing in reputation, revenue and market value.
• The New Code Rush (or Extinction Event). No going back. After the Crossroads, companies have two widely divergent paths, with significant momentum (both positive and negative) that is extremely difficult to reverse.

The Crossroads Model — Ionization, Spark, Enrichment and the Crossroads — has played out in a dozen-plus major industries, and we believe it will play out in many others in the coming years. . For example, upon Amazon’s IPO in 1997 — in spite of the lofty valuation that the consumer e-commerce pioneer achieved amid the Internet bubble and its resulting over-inflation of value — Borders and Barnes & Noble were collectively eight times the value of the online retail giant, with roughly 50 times the revenue and 100 times the customer base. As Amazon quickly enriched its understanding of Code Halos, consumer e-commerce entered the Crossroads in 2002. By 2005, Amazon was worth twice as much as Borders and Barnes & Noble combined, and had equaled both retailers’ customer count (in similar markets such as book, movie and music retailing) and associated revenues. Just five years later, Amazon was worth 100 times more than Borders and Barnes & Noble combined, and had driven Borders to bankruptcy. Barnes & Nobles’ struggles, meanwhile, recently deepened amid the sudden resignation of its CEO (who championed its underperforming Nook e-book reader) and word that the company is pursuing a radical restructuring.

In this period of generational transformative change more and more leaders concur: They see enormous opportunities for organizations that get Code Halos right (Apple, Google, GE, Disney, etc.); and feel pain for those whose leaders get it wrong (Borders, HMV, Blockbuster, etc.).Organizations that optimize their Code Halos across all dimensions and permutations will more effectively negotiate the Crossroads divide, heading onward and upward toward market prosperity. 

Read more about Code Halos and the rules for successfully managing the Crossroads at www.unevenlydistributed.com.

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at 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 Expert Video Series: Greg Donaldson

I had the honor of interviewing a brilliant entrepreneur and SAP mobility expert, Greg Donaldson yesterday in Sydney.  I love his thinking.  He doesn't need to conquer the world, he just wants to provide SAP users with great mobile apps, in the cloud, for a low cost.

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDC1WQrRFuE&feature=share&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at 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 Collaboration and Business Transformation

I am in Australia this week speaking SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) and meeting with companies to discuss their strategies.  In this short video, filmed on the beautiful beach in Manly, Australia, I share on enterprise collaboration strategies.

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fofJ4FhAbMc&feature=share&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at 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 Eight Rs of Enterprise Mobility, Opportunity Costs and Strategic Investments

It is true that enterprise mobility is about the eight Rs - getting the right information, to the right person, at the right time, in the right place, in the right amount, on the right device, in the right format so they can make right decisions, but there are even more benefits.  Enterprise mobility can also be about saving money that can be invested more profitably in other places.  Let me share a real-life scenario:

A large distributor of consumer package goods and fresh food, with many delivery trucks would often run out of inventory that customers along their routes would request when the drivers arrived.  These requests represented potential sales that could not be captured because the products were not available in the trucks.  The end result was sales were not being maximized.

What were some possible ways to solve this problem?

1. The distributor could reroute the delivery trucks back to the warehouse to load more product, but that would delay deliveries to other customers, potentially reducing both service quality and sales while increasing costs (time, labor, fuel, maintenance).  
2. The distributor could open more warehouses so inventory would be available closer to routes and customers.  The challenge would be increased costs.
3. A process of delivering (with more trucks and drivers) unscheduled orders could be developed.  The problem, however, would be the additional expense to set-up and operate it.
4. The distributor could ignore their customers' request for last-minute product sales, and open up an opportunity for competitors to capture this business.

How did enterprise mobility solutions help solve this challenge?  We helped the distributor by implementing real-time communications and inventory systems on their mobile devices, GPS tracking and real-time scheduling solutions that enabled a few roving trucks full of commonly needed inventory to meet-up with multiple delivery drivers and top-off their inventories (JIT, just-in-time) along their routes without delaying them from their scheduled deliveries.

The distributor improved customer service and sales with limited investment.  They also prevented their competition from making inroads.  They used a limited investment in technologies (enterprise mobility solutions) to get products to the right customers at the right time without spending all of their investment funds.  The mobile solutions enabled them to NOT have to make massive investments in more warehouses, trucks, labor and infrastructure so they could make smarter investments in other places.

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at 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.

Wearable Devices, Mobile Apps, Sensors and Clothing Companies

Nike FuelBand

As I was working this morning I become annoyed that my Nike FuelBand kept rubbing against my MacBook Pro keyboard while I was typing.  The Nike FuelBand is my first wearable (M2M or IoT) device.  It is a bluetooth enabled sensor inside a wristband.  The sensor has an accelerometer that records the level of activities you participate in during a 24 hour period.  When you press a button it syncs its recorded data with your iPhone.  The iPhone in turn uploads the FuelBand data into your Nike account in the cloud.

Once the data enters your mobile app on the iPhone and/or your account in the cloud, it analyzes it against past and future activities, recorded goals and other measurements.  On nearly every screen you are encouraged to be social, and to share your activity data with friends, family and the Nike social family.  There is also a whole lot of gamification going on.  You can escape and survive all kinds of dangers presented in a game on the Nike cloud site by keeping your activities up and meeting your goals.

One of the challenges, however, is the Nike FuelBand does not have a GPS tracking system (although your iPhone does), nor does it know you are engaged in certain activities like riding a bike, either on the road or a stationary one.  There is no method for manually entering activities that are not easily monitored by the Nike FuelBand.  I solved a few of those problems, after a little research, by integrating the Nike FuelBand app and account, with my Nike Running app (which uses my iPhone GPS capability).  I could then precisely track times, distances, paces and routes. Both the FuelBand and the Running app are integrated through my Nike cloud account so they can both access the same data and monitor my activities accurately.

I was, however, still faced with the problem of recording and tracking exercises and activities that are not accurately captured by the Nike FuelBand or the Nike Running app on my iPhone.  I eventually discovered a solution, however, by finding that I could integrate my Lose It! mobile app with my Nike cloud account as well.  Lose It! is a great app for manually tracking calories consumed and exercises completed.  Lose It! does not have its own hardware or sensors, but integrating it (a simple check box) with my Nike cloud based account enabled it to share data I manually entered, and for the Lose It! app to read and integrate sensor data from my Nike Running app and my Nike FuelBand (wearable sensor).

Let's review the components:

• iPhone and GPS sensor
• Nike FuelBand (bluetooth enabled accelerometer sensor in a wristband that communicates with your iPhone) to monitor activity levels
• Nike Running iPhone app that uses the iPhone GPS to track distance, speed, pace, etc.
• Nike cloud based account to aggregate, analyze, report on and archive the data
• Lose It! iPhone app that enables you to manually enter foods/calories and exercises.  It can be integrated with your Nike cloud based account so exercises, activity levels and running data can be more accurate and shared.

I believe the wearable mobile device and exercise/activity apps market will mature and these disparate capabilities will soon converge into a single wearable device and a full functional app.  Today, however, us early adopters have the fun of discovering their limitations, reviewing each update, and finding work-a-rounds.

It is quite interesting to me, that a clothing/shoe company, Nike in this case, is so involved in high tech sensors, mobile hardware, cloud based solutions, social and gaming platforms and analytics.  It is the beginnings of the digitization of clothing.  I know Under Armor is also deeply involved in these digital transformations.

These clothing companies understand that their brands are increasingly going to be judged by the quality of their digital presence, rather than just the quality of their physical designs and materials.  It is a different world that we live in today.   One that we should all be pondering.

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at 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.