Using Artificial Intelligence in Health Services Requires Real-Time Enterprise Mobility

I am intrigued by the increasing use of artificial intelligence in areas like field services management and home healthcare services.  I read a use case (http://www.clicksoftware.com/Collateral/Documents/English-US/KinCare-Case-Study.pdf) this morning about KinCare and ClickSoftware in Australia.  KinCare provides all kinds of home and healthcare services across a wide geography in Australia.  They are one of the largest providers of in-home care and assistance in Australia and they get paid by providing documented services compliant with government regulations.  There are designated fees for each service and there are little to no margins for errors. It is very easy to screw up and to lose a lot of money in this kind of operation.

Let me provide an example of KinCare's services:

• Nursing care
• Personal care
• Domestic assistance
• Social support
• Respite care
• Transportation
• Case management

Some of their clients need all of these services.  These services are often provided by different people at different times.  Let's image tens of thousands of clients, care givers and service providers located all across Australia.  All of these participants and their appointments must be scheduled and coordinated.  Does that sound like a big enough challenge for you Mate?

The only way to run this kind of operation efficiently is to make sure the care givers and service providers are connected (via mobile devices) to an intelligent software system (using artificial intelligence and context aware systems) to understand how to most efficiently provide and schedule hundreds of thousands of services.  In addition, must also make sure each care and service provider is qualified, available and in close proximity.  Also it is important to note that these services are critical to a persons health and welfare.

The mobile devices are used as mobile data collection devices, sensors (GPS) and reporting systems in the service delivery process. Mobile devices feed real-time data to the real-time analytics and artificial intelligence systems that schedule all parties across the country.  Since all of these participants are mobile, it takes very careful and fast analytics to ensure all parties can meet in the right places, deliver and receive services efficiently, document services and invoice for those services.

Smartphones and tablets, broadband internet connectivity and ultra-fast artificial intelligence capabilities integrated with human resource, talent management, scheduling, case management, patient and service management, billing and dispatch systems are all required to make this work.  Wow!  Speed and artificial intelligence systems are revolutionizing these kinds of operations today.

When I am out teaching mobile and SMAC strategies to large companies the topics of speed, context aware and artificial intelligence comes up every time.  These are the game changers today.

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

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: Romeo Elias

I had the privilege of interviewing mobility and BPM expert and the CEO/President of Interneer, Romeo Elias on their company's products and strategies for providing a cloud based enterprise mobility solution.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwygz5F80nI&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.

Digital Millennials and The Real Reason Employees Want BYOD

"Thanks to the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution that has unfolded over the last two decades - which is rapidly and radically transforming how knowledge and information are generated, disseminated and collaborated on to create value - the high-wage medium-skilled job is over."
~ Stephanie Sanford, Chief of Global Policy and Advocacy for the College Board.

The middle-class jobs of the past, the jobs you and I could start with and retire from, are mostly gone today.  It is much harder for millennials to find jobs that require simply hard-work, responsibility and dedication.  In today's world, in order for a millennial to live a traditional middle-class lifestyle that supports home ownership, cars, a college education and a family, it takes a different mindset and inventory of skills.  A set of skills our education system has yet to fully understand and embrace.  These are the skills of a digital millennial (DM).

DMs depend less on company issued laptops, smartphones and tablets, as they prefer to bring their own personal devices (BYOD) and tools that can accompany them from job to job and employer to employer.  DMs depend less on companies for  software applications and seek cloud-based applications and services that are tied to them personally, not just their current employer.  DMs seek recognition for their work beyond the four walls of their employer.  They want their contacts and followers (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+) to be on their own personal networks, not just their current employers'.  They want their accumulated work history, reputation, skill sets and competencies to be in the public domain, not buried inside the file cabinet of a past boss.

I propose that DMs will also favor and advocate for investments, retirement and health insurance plans that are abstracted from employers, and attached to them personally.  These plans will follow them throughout their careers with no dependency on a particular employer.

To quote from Thomas L. Friedman, "The globalization/IT revolution is super empowering individuals, enabling them to challenge hierarchies’ and traditional authority figures from business to science to government." As businesses increasingly take advantage of technologies that reduce their dependence on and loyalty to the middle-class as a workforce,  the aware DMs or "super-empowered middle-class" will recognize their need to view employment as a transient state, rather than a semi-permanent state and will adjust their habits and practices to meet these emerging realities.

Let me quote from McKinsey Global Institute's James Manyika,  "How we think about 'employment' needs to expand to include a broader set of possibilities for generating income compared with the traditional job.  To be in the middle-class, you may need to consider not only high-skilled jobs, but also nontraditional forms of work.  Work itself may have to be thought of as a "form of entrepreneurship" where you draw on all kinds of assets and skills to generate income."

DMs of the future may find their dreams for a middle-class lifestyle can only be accomplished by engaging in multiple income generating activities.  They may rent out a room in their home through AirBnB, rent their car out through Lyft, sell products via eBay and contract their time and skills out through online contractors marketplaces.

DMs may view traditional home ownership as more of a liability than a benefit as their income sources and locations are less predictable.  They may seek stability in digital assets rather than physical.  We see this modeled when physical photos were replaced by digital photos, and as one's life-narrative migrated from a neighborhood and employer to Facebook and LinkedIn timelines.

DMs will find it hard to maintain a long career with one company or a dedication to just one area of expertise.  They will find it hard to cruise into retirement.  They need to adopt a new lifestyle that recognizes and values agility, persistent learning, networks and the survival skills and tools necessary in this new world.  In today's world, those tools look a lot like cloud-based services and marketplaces, social networking platforms and mobile apps running on personal smartphones and tablets.

For more information on the future of work and similar trends visit, www.unevenlydistributed.com.

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

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.

Supporting GIS and Mapping Solutions on Muddy Tablets

J.D. Axford, P.E. CESCL

I want to introduce you to a long time friend of mine J.D. Axford.  He is a civil engineer with all kinds of acronyms after his name (P.E., CESCL, etc.), who has worked for most of his career in the Northwest of the USA in and around water and mud.  He is a hero among the duck population for his many years working with wetlands.  He is you may say, an expert in outdoor field data collection.

I can remember a time about 25 years ago when J.D. and myself were perched above a waterfall along the East Fork of the Lewis river in Washington state measuring water flow and collecting data together.  It was, in fact, cold and muddy work.

He shared with me recently the list of things he typically carries in his service backpack to collect data:

• bubble levels
• incline-ometers
• rangefinders
• GPS accurate enough to serve as an inspection-level pre-survey grade checker
• wet papers
• job reports
• field notes
• redline drawings
• change orders

He is a big fan of finding ways of reducing the items in his backpack by utilizing mobile apps.  In this article J.D. shares his insights on data, data collection, mobile devices, GIS and how they are all used in utilities work.

Collecting data is a big job.  Utilities both generate and demand tremendous amounts of data. They are designed and operated with the use of a lot of geospatial and asset data.  Maintenance and repair work generates data, which is of particular importance in predicting future staffing needs, maintenance costs, and for the management of risks. In the distribution side (in electrical utilities) data is generated that is used to predict economics parameters, consumer demand, and other trends essential to profitability.

A lot of data is also generated by field crews which come from tasks related to vegetation control, drainage and other similar items. This work and the data generated are of increasing importance as infrastructure ages and budgets tighten. The information must be captured accurately by field staff and uploaded to geospatial databases and document management systems and then be made available to all the stakeholders.

All of this data collection, especially the outdoor data collection, benefits from mobile devices. Think about the environment. Maintaining a utility grid requires working remotely, often in multiple locations per day and on a variety of different projects and issues.  A lot of data is collected in rugged, cold, damp and muddy locations.  In these environments, tablets are very useful as they are light-weight and offer the simultaneous ability to capture, store, query and process data.  Tablets can significantly reduce the time and effort needed to manage data if you can keep them from being damaged.

As important as tablets have become to many engineers and utilities, they still have limitations as memory is limited, the service environment can be harsh and connectivity lost. There is also the challenge related to different tablets using different operating systems.  Some GIS and mapping applications only support one operating system. Many of these limitations, however, can be solved by the right software.  Vendors like We-Do-IT of Australia have developed tablet-based GIS software solutions made to operate online and offline, on a wide variety of tablets and operating systems while integrating with most GIS and ERP systems.

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

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.

Selling and Buying Enterprise Mobility

One of my first jobs after I graduated from Portland State University was to work at Dale Carnegie and Associates.  I helped sell and teach all kinds of professional development classes on public speaking, management and sales.  I still remember one of the rules we taught in the Human Relations Approach to Sales class, "Customers don't want to buy your product or service, they want the results of your product or service."  I believe that rule applies equally well today to enterprise mobility platforms, mobile security and development tools.

What do you think are the results of enterprise mobility platforms that customers want to buy?  I will start the list and you can finish it:

• Increased speed or tempo of operations to gain a competitive advantage
• Efficient data collection so better and faster business decisions can be made
• Quicker reporting of events and KPIs to a wider audience to provide full situational awareness and promote good decision making and issue resolution
• Improved workforce productivity due to real-time data collection, artificial intelligence and reporting
• Reduced expenses and waste due to inefficient resource allocation
• Improved visibility to remote operations and projects so better data driven decisions can be made
• More collaboration, faster and with more remote workers contributing to good decision making
• Higher profits due to efficiency gains
• etc.

It is useful to understand that if these results could be achieved without purchasing mobile platforms and tools they would be.  No one wants to purchase, develop, test, maintain and support these mobile solutions.   They are a lot of work and distract from your core business.  The reality is though in today's world, mobile platforms, mobile app development tools, app stores and mobile security solutions are a necessity.

Any discussion with a mobility platform and tool vendor should, at a minimum, start with identifying the business results your company wants.  Any feature or function the mobility vendor shares and demonstrates should be tied back to a business result on your list.  Don't let a mobility vendor discuss features that aren't tied back to a business result.  Although painful for the mobility vendor's sales team, holding the vendor to this exercise makes the presentation far more entertaining and valuable for you!

Last week I wrote an article titled Enterprise Mobility, Business Executives and Mobility Vendors.  In that article I reported that more CIOs and CEOs are getting involved in decisions about enterprise mobility.  Why?  I believe executives are seeing enterprise mobility as a catalyst for digital transformation.  It is one step, although a very important step, to transforming their companies to meet the demands of a digital market place.  A market place where the competitive differentiators are digital competencies.

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

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.