Enterprise Mobility, Legos and Mobile Trends in 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May your 2013 be filled with joy and learning!

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant
Read The Future of Work
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility
Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

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

Have you seen Gartner's recently published 2013 top ten strategic technology trends?  If not here they are:
  1. Mobile Devices Battles
  2. Mobile Applications and HTML5
  3. Personal Cloud
  4. Internet of Things
  5. Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
  6. Strategic Big Data
  7. Actionable Analytics
  8. Mainstream In-Memory Computing
  9. Integrated Ecosystems
  10. Enterprise App Stores
I come from an enterprise mobility background and a focus on mobile strategies, so when I read this list I see mobility written in just about every one of these.  Four of the top ten are all about enterprise mobility.  Four through nine are related to managing a real-time enterprise, optimizing a mobile workforce, and understanding the value of data driven decision making.  Again, all crucial elements to an effective enterprise mobility strategy.

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

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

The technology trends identified here are transformational.  Vice Admiral (retired) Arthur K. Cebrowski shared the following concepts while serving at the Office of Force Transformation, "Transformation is meant to deal with the evolution of concepts, processes, organizations and technology.  Change in any one of these four areas necessitates change in all."  The bottom line is that these technology trends point toward a need for change in concepts, processes and organizations. 
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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant
Read The Future of Work
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility
Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

SMAC Tsunamis and Mobile Strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant
Read The Future of Work
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.

Field Mobility News Weekly – Week of December 16, 2012

The Field Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to field mobility 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 M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly
Also read SMAC News Weekly

Maryland’s Baltimore County has installed GPS technology in over 900 of its government vehicles.  Officials expect to save close to $100,000 per year in taxpayer dollars for fuel costs in addition to saving employees’ time.  Read Original Content

Raytheon UK has been awarded a contract by the UK Ministry of Defense for a new GPS Anti-Jam Antenna System for use by land vehicles.  Read Original Content

Milan’s Ambrosiana Art Gallery provides RFID-enabled smartphones to enable guests to learn about the works of art and save a list of pieces they like, to use at the museum store to purchase prints.  Read Original Content

ILS Technology provides ready-to-use cloud based platforms to implement and manage M2M (machine to machine) and embedded wireless devices that connect to SAP.  ILS Technology simplifies deployments and offers unparalleled security to protect company and customer data and to ensure regulatory compliance. This newsletter is sponsored in part by ILS Technology.

The Vatican will use new ID cards with RFID technology for clergy and employees beginning in the new year.  Read Original Content

The Transfusion Medicine RFID Consortium reported the results of an RFID pilot, finding the use of RFID resulted in a 33 percent reduction of issues or misplaced products at blood-donation points, and final inventory check-in efficiency increased by 63 percent.  Read Original Content

GIS technology can be the basis for revolutionizing how government processes work through its ability for accessing and producing maps, leveraging database information and automating work processes.  Read Original Content
A group of four students from Tennessee’s Austin Peay State University conducted a research study comparing the accuracy of GPS enabled devices, including smartphones and tablets, for field use.  The results were presented at the Geological Society of America’s national conference in Charlotte, NC.  Read Original Content

Edgetech America’s GIS spell-checker MapSpeller has been updated.  The new version 4.0 includes support for 11 languages and the extended ability to correct maps and GIS data geographically.  Read Original Content

Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly – Week of December 16, 2012

Welcome to Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly, an online newsletter that consists of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility in Asia.  Asia is predicted to be the fastest area of growth for enterprise mobility between now and 2016.

Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
Also read M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly
Also read SMAC News Weekly

Komli Mobile and mobile ad network Yoose have formed a partnership for mobile advertising services, focusing initially on Southeast Asia and India.  Read Original Content

The Indian government is planning a pilot project with new technology to help locate lost or cloned mobile phones on a real time basis.  Read Original Content

When asked why the telecom doesn’t carry Apple’s iPhone, China Mobile president Li Yue stated “technology is a problem, but it isn't the entire problem, there's also mainly the issue of business model and mutual benefits”.  Read Original Content

ClickSoftware is an SAP mobility partner and the leading provider of automated workforce management and optimization solutions for every size of service business.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by ClickSoftware.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority Communications Report 2011/12 reveals 49 percent of Australian adults own a smartphone, up from 25 percent in 2010/11, and 32 percent of Australians accessed the Internet via mobile phones in June 2012, up from 21 percent the previous year.  Read Original Content

According to a recent study from GfK, 23 percent of “super connected” consumers live in the Asia Pacific region, with the largest number of these online users residing in Taiwan and South Korea.  Read Original Content

The Australian cloud computing market was worth $882.4 million in 2012, and 43 percent of businesses have adopted cloud computing.  Frost & Sullivan predicts the market will grow at a CAGR of 40.3 percent from 2011-2016.  Read Original Content

Xiaomi Technology has become a leading brand in China, the world’s largest mobile market, with some in the mobile industry calling the company “the next big thing”.  In an interview with Reuters, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun predicted seven million smartphones will be sold by the end of the year.  Read Original Content

According to IDC, Apple’s iPhone dropped to number six among smartphones in China during the third quarter of 2012, dropping from its number four place in the second quarter.  Read Original Content

Mobile Health News Weekly – Week of December 9, 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
Also read SMAC News Weekly

The latest research indicates the global mHealth market was worth $1.2 billion in 2011, but will jump in value to reach $11.8 billion by 2018, climbing at an impressive Compound Annual Growth Rate of 39 percent. Read Original Content

Kessler Foundation, of West Orange, New Jersey, and Happtique, a digital platform for curating, certifying, and prescribing mobile health apps, are slated to lead a new working group focused on apps intended for use in health, medicine, and wellness, announced a recent news release. Read Original Content

A slew of new devices leveraging improved connectivity to mobile handsets have fueled strong growth for wearable wireless mHealth devices in 2012. By the end of the year, nearly 30 million devices will have shipped, up 37 percent on 2011 shipments. Read Original Content

ClickSoftware is an SAP mobility partner and the leading provider of automated workforce management and optimization solutions for every size of service business.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by ClickSoftware.

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

AT&T has launched a cloud patient-monitoring service that will help doctors manage patients' chronic diseases through live video chat. Read Original Content
http://www.eweek.com/mobile/att-unveils-cloud-video-patient-monitoring-service/

With telehealth and at-home care for the aging emerging as new care delivery models, mass adoption of mobile devices and advancing mobile technology, the demand for mobile health apps will continue to grow, according to Malgorzata Filar from Forst and Sullivan. Read Original Content
Mobile health’s impact on the pharmaceutical industry has been steadily increasing in recent years. Since 2008, the search volume percentage of “mobile health” new mentions on Google has increased from approximately 40 percent to more than 80 percent in 2012. Read Original Content

More than half of smartphone owners use their devices to get health info and one-fifth of smartphone owners have at least one health app on their phone, according to the 2012 mobile health survey released November 8 by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. Read Original Content

A new survey reveals key findings concerning the use of tablets, eReaders, and smartphones among nursing professors. One of the survey’s key findings was that among this group, 71 percent owned a smartphone, 47 percent owned a tablet computer, and 39 percent owned an eBook reader. Read Original Content

The United States will look to Africa to gain knowledge about advances in mobile health technologies because Tanzania, among other countries, already has maternal child health and community health worker programs that rely on smart phones. Read Original Content

Recent Articles by Kevin Benedict

Kevin Benedict's What's New in HTML5 - Week of December 9, 2012
Enterprise Mobility, Disinterested Workers and Globalization
Information Operations: The Fifth Dimension of Warfare
The Role Big Data Plays with the Real-Time Enterprise, Mobile Strategies and Field Services
Smart Grids, ERP, Big Data and Mobility

Recorded Webinars of Note

Netcentric Strategies Enterprise Mobility Survey Results

Whitepapers of Note

5 Tips to Minimize the Impact of Rising Fuel Costs in Field Service
Mobility Innovations for the Next Generation Utility
Networked Field Services

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant
Read The Future of Work
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 News Weekly – Week of December 9, 2012

The Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility 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 Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read SMAC News Weekly

Gartner predicts sales of 1.2 billion smartphones and tablets in 2013, a 50 percent increase over this year. Smart devices, including smartphones and tablets, will account for 70 percent of the total number of devices sold by the end of 2012.  Read Original Content

IDC projects sales of 717.5 million smartphones in 2012, or about twice as many as PCs, both portable and desktop. The gulf is expected to widen in 2016.  Read Original Content

The mobile chipset market is in a state of flux with a number of key vendors struggling, but analysts say the result of the turmoil will be more advanced high-end smartphones and cheaper low-end devices.  Read Original Content

Founded in 1979, DSI is a global provider of Enterprise Mobility Solutions®, helping companies worldwide increase productivity and profitability regardless of data source, device type, operating system or network connectivity.  DSI serves clients globally through its offices in Australia, Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by DSI.

IDC has released its latest prediction for the global mobile phone market, forecasting the industry will grow only 1.4 percent year over year in 2012, while smartphone shipments are expected to grow 45.1 percent from 2011.  Read Original Content

Canalys estimates just 25 developers accounted for half the application revenue in the United States in Apple’s App Store (iPhone only) and Google Play during the first 20 days of November 2012. Between them, they made $60 million (£37m) from paid-for downloads and in-app purchases over this period, the report said.  Read Original Content

Many of the most popular mobile applications for children are collecting personal information and sharing it with advertising agencies or other third parties without telling the users or their parents, according to a report issued Monday by the Federal Trade Commission.  Read Original Content

Digitimes Research said they expect Android to continue to dominate with 70 percent of the market and 600 million devices, iOS to remain stagnant at around 20 percent share, while the other 10 percent will be shared by the other, smaller platforms.  Read Original Content

Kevin Benedict’s What’s New in HTML5 – Week of December 9, 2012

According to FaveQuest CEO Allan Isfan, HTML5 didn’t revolutionize the mobile business as expected, but instead it “over promised and under delivered”.  Read Original Content

The QNX CAR HMI framework for the automotive environment features HTML5-based technology and a direct development path from mobile to automotive.  Read Original Content

According to a post on the Codiqa blog, HTML5 is a “revolution for the open web” and more companies and developers stand to gain through the greater adoption of HTML5 than with proprietary platforms such as iOS.  “Looking into the future, we strongly believe that HTML5 and open web technologies will increasingly become the standard for mobile and desktop development.”  Read Original Content

App47 announced it has added HTML5 support to its enterprise mobile application management platform, stating “more and more enterprise clients are choosing HTML5 over native when looking to get out the door faster and deliver mobile apps to employees in less time and for less money”.  Read Original Content

Firefox for Android has expanded its HTML5 video capabilities to include H.264 video playback.  Read Original Content

App Studio is a new cloud-based HTML5 solution from Quark that “turns print into interactive digital experiences”, offering developers the flexibility to use tools familiar to them to create app content for smartphones and tablets.  Read Original Content

Nokia’s new site was built with HTML5 as the company feels HTML5 is more accommodating, with the different components of the web page making it easier to add video, social media and other content.  Read Original Content
Andrew Gazdecki, founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, feels startups should develop both mobile apps and HTML5 mobile websites, and should consider developing for the mobile web first, rather than developing an app on each platform at the beginning.  Read Original Content

UK footwear company Schuh has launched a new mobile site completely built in HTML5.  Read Original Content

A chart featured in Ciklum’s blog shows over 80 percent of developers are not satisfied with HTML5 monetization and over 70 percent are dissatisfied with performance and fragmentation.  Read Original Content

Sesame Workshop’s Noah Broadwater points out that while enterprises don’t want to build the same thing over and over again, they don’t have much choice right now as HTML5 remains comparatively weak for rich interactivity, video and other features, and there is still no HTML5 standard.  Read Original Content

UpSync has added HTML5 support to its Intelligently Integrated Selling platform enabling administrators to upload HTML5 apps as well as other multimedia content audio, video and documents.  Read Original Content

Web jeweler Ice.com has launched an HTML5-based m-commerce site that resembles an app in appearance, navigation and functionality.  “An HTML5 mobile web site cannot do everything an app can, but Ice shows it can provide a convincing replication.”  Read Original Content

In the first in a series of HTML5 tutorials designed for developers, WP Engine co-founder Aaron Brazell covers “Working with HTML5 Forms”.  Read Original Content

Webinar distributor BrightTalk now features an HTML5 player, enabling mobile users to watch videos that weren’t previously accessible.  Read Original Content

ServiceMax, creator of cloud-based, mobile and social field service applications, has released the HTML5-based ServiceMax Winter ’13.  Read Original Content

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant
Read The Future of Work
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 Commerce News Weekly – Week of December 9, 2012

The Mobile Commerce News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile commerce and marketing, mobile payments, mobile money, e-wallets, mobile banking, mobile ads and mobile security that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
Also read M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly
Also read SMAC News Weekly

Published reports suggest “spending on mobile advertising, especially on mobile display ads, in the Middle East is expected to reach $10 million in 2012, added that they predict the figure to grow annually from 15 to 20 percent.” Read Original Content

Digital marketing and media research firm eMarketer predicts U.S. mobile advertising revenues will experience rapid growth in the coming years. The research group has projected U.S. mobile advertising revenues will more than quadruple from the $1.45 billion seen in 2011 to $6.62 billion in 2014, and to be worth nearly $12 billion by 2016. Read Original Content

A survey by IMS Research revealed 60 percent of consumers were interested in mobile payments. The survey comprised of 700 consumers from China, Japan, Poland, South Korea, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S., in which 60 percent of respondents were either “very interested” or “interested”. Read Original Content

Founded in 1979, DSI is a global provider of Enterprise Mobility Solutions®, helping companies worldwide increase productivity and profitability regardless of data source, device type, operating system or network connectivity.  DSI serves clients globally through its offices in Australia, Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by DSI.

This week Square launched gift cards on the latest version of its Wallet app for the iPhone and Android, allowing customers to send and use gift cards without carrying around a piece of plastic, reports the Next Web. Read Original Content

A recent mobile marketing survey of 1,000 American adult consumers by Sybase 365 and the Mobile Marketing Association showed unsurprisingly that mobile devices are more important than ever before when it comes to purchases. Findings include 87 percent of survey participants will have their holiday shopping affected by their mobile device. Read Original Content


Visa Inc. seeks to promote mobile payments in Myanmar, believing the country will move to adopt emerging financial infrastructures to enable its mostly rural population to access such payments and other banking services. Read Original Content

U.S. Bank is to use technology from Mitek to enable consumers to set up bill payments by simply snapping a picture of their paper bill using their camera-enabled smartphone or tablet. Read Original Content

The U.K. research group, Juniper Research, has issued a new forecast for the growth of NFC and they've scaled back their estimates from $180 billion in NFC transactions to $110 billion by 2017. Read Original Content

Enterprise Mobility, Disinterested Workers and Globalization

I am in the United Kingdom this week teaching mobile strategies and meeting with different businesses.  Today I met with two different companies and then spoke at an evening mobility event. It was a long but interesting day.

I had two different discussions today with companies that asked, "How do you convince your workforce to embrace enterprise mobility?"  Both of these companies are in the services industry and are faced with an aging workforce that is less than enthusiastic about new mobile technologies, innovation and business transformation.  This is a hard question to answer.  How would you answer it?

My only real answer is to educate the workforce and management on the realities of global competition.    Few companies work in a vacuum.  Few companies are so powerful that they can dictate economic mega-trends.  Most companies face competition, and competitors are most often looking to take your customers, jobs and money.

One mega-trend is "time-space compression."  Time-space compression occurs as a result of technologies that seem to accelerate speed and reduce distances.  Companies are striving to operate in a real-time environment with real-time communications, mobility, visibility, real-time data collection and real-time business analytics.  These trends require enterprise mobility.  If a company ignores these mega-trends, or does not adapt to this reality, their workforce may soon regret it.

If you are interested in learning more about mobile strategies, I invite you to join me and Mike Karlskind, VP of Service Optimization Strategies with ClickSoftware for a live webinar, Tuesday, December 18th at 11 AM EST where we will discuss "The Role Big Data Plays in Real-Time Enterprises, Mobile Strategies and Field Services."  Register Here!


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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant
Read The Future of Work
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.

Information Operations: The Fifth Dimension of Warfare

The US Military recognizes at least five dimensions of warfare for which it is responsible:

  1. Land
  2. Sea
  3. Air
  4. Space
  5. Information
The fifth dimension, information, has direct relevance to enterprise mobility and mobile strategies. In the military conference I spoke at last week, the other speakers taught me the importance of dominating the fifth dimension. It is a compettive battlefield (market) and dominance is required.

In an article I read this morning titled, Information Operations: The Fifth Dimension of Warfare, by General Ronald R. Fogleman, Air Force chief of staff, he relates the following, "[In the past] the Ninth Tactical Air Force required two to three days to combine information and combat firepower to do the job they had to do. Today we synchronize forces in hours if not minutes. With our information operations we dramatically reduce the time required to detect and to destroy a target." That is a fifth dimension competitive advantage.

Here is another excerpt from the article, "[Winston] Churchill is quoted saying, 'In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.'" The Allies viewed their strategy for the use of information as the cornerstone of their success.

Another point made by General Foleman is that it is important to recognize information has a shelf life and if you can't use it in a timely manner, the information is wasted. Let me provide an example. If you have a service technician that finished a job early, but reports it only at the end of the work shift, that information is wasted. No work schedule optimization can be instigated at the end of the shift. That information had a shelf life that came and went.

Information advantages enabled by mobile technologies and communication are incredibly powerful. Historically, [military] commanders have been constrained by their ability to service and understand markets. Today things are different. Mobile technologies, real time information, Big Data, and business analytics enable managers to visualize remote and distant events in real time. This same information advantage concept allows companies to expand their markets and geographic reach. In my workshops I call this "force projection" - another term I stole from military jargon.

With the emergence of social media, there are even more new real time information based environments to be concerned with. I read this comment the other day by Zach Hofer-Shall, a social intelligence analyst at Forrester Research, "Deriving predictive marketing decisions from social analytics is not the same as social media monitoring. Most companies remain stuck reactively monitoring what happened yesterday." My first thought was he sounds like a social media snob, but then I understood what he was saying (I never claimed to be fast). He is saying there are ways of utilizing information that can predict events in the future, and this predictive capability is not just reviewing old information. It is a different way of using data that can potentially provide another information advantage. Wow!

Mobile technologies can provide information advantages if the rest of your IT and management environment can support the process, analysis and utilization of real time information.

Mobile technologies are enablers, but there are most often significant change management issues to deal with in the companies I have worked with. There is usually work to be done to ensure systems can support the "real time enterprise model" and that we can transform our decision making and management processes to utilize real time information as a competitive advantage.
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant
Read The Future of Work
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 News Weekly – Week of December 9, 2012

Welcome to SMAC News Weekly, featuring the latest news and numbers relating to SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) that I come across each week.

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

Each of us is impacted by SMAC.  We all use mobile devices and social networking solutions like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  We use search engines, maps and weather apps, all of which use analytics and are in the cloud.  SMAC is the combination of all of these trends coming together on mobile devices.  This convergence is impacting businesses in many different ways.  We will do our best to capture these by reporting on the SMAC trends, numbers and forecasts in this weekly newsletter.

Implementation of big data solutions will grow by a compound annual growth rate of more than 30 percent and will speed up pervasive analytics deployment. Big data spending is expected to increase from about $470 million in 2012 to $1.4 billion by 2016. Read Original Content

Forty-four percent of security professionals working at enterprise organizations believe security data collection and analysis could be considered “big data” today while another 44 percent believe security data collection will qualify as “big data” within two years. Read Original Content

Research shows that the quality of customer service among banks has increased as more turn to social media to address customer inquiries. A study by Virgin Media Business has revealed that nearly two-thirds of UK high street banks using Twitter are responding to customer complaints and questions within an hour. Read Original Content

While social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies add a new dimension to your model, to fully maximize their value consider the sum is greater than its parts. The formula for the Future of Work is called SMAC - social, mobile, analytics and cloud on one integrated stack, where each function enables another to maximize their effect.  To learn more about SMAC and Cognizant please visit http://www.cognizant.com/futureofwork/smac.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by Cognizant.

Microsoft developers now have the option to deploy their Windows Server based applications in the Amazon Web Services, and it's just the latest Amazon move to solidify its position as the true cloud leader. Read Original Content

Big data analysis platform provider Coveo has landed an $18 million funding round led by Canada’s Tandem Expansion Fund. The company recently launched its Coveo for Salesforce product, integrating Big Data insights into Salesforce CRM interface. Read Original Content


According to Information Week, 18 percent of big data-focused companies in the InformationWeek 2012 State of IT Staffing Survey want to increase staff in this area by more than 30 percent in the next two years, but 53 percent say it'll be hard to find people with the required skills. Read Original Content

Research firm Gartner expects big data to drive $28 billion in IT spending this year and $34 billion in 2013. And according to IDC, 90 percent of digital content will be unstructured data -- i.e., the emails, voice and video Autonomy technology handles -- by 2015. Read Original Content

Intel is aiming to extend its recognition with the open source, developer and big data arenas by now offering an open source programmer tool aimed at supporting big data analysis. The Intel GraphBuilder tool has been specifically engineered to help handle big data for computer learning. Read Original Content

Recent Articles by Kevin Benedict

The Role Big Data Plays with the Real-Time Enterprise, Mobile Strategies and Field Services
Smart Grids, ERP, Big Data and Mobility
Kevin Benedict's What's New in HTML5 - Week of December 2, 2012
Notes from the Enterprise Mobility in Defense Conference
M2M Analysis by ABIresearch
Enterprise Mobility and the Military
Chat Mobility with Me (Kevin Benedict) on December 7th
Connecting the Strategic to the Tactical - Enterprise Mobility

Recorded Webinars of Note

Netcentric Strategies Enterprise Mobility Survey Results


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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant
Read The Future of Work
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.

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