By Jyoti Lalchandani


With work habits continually evolving and the proliferation of mobile devices enabling more employees to escape the physical constraints of the office, the concept of enterprise mobility is a hot topic of conversation among IT and business leaders across the Middle East. But true enterprise mobility isn’t simply about equipping employees with the latest iPhone and sending them on their way; these mobile employees must also have the necessary tools at their disposal to do their jobs properly at any time and in any place. Indeed, if they can’t access the critical data and applications needed to perform the tasks required of them, then those expensively purchased iPhones are nothing but glorified e-mail readers.
Fortunately, the emergence of technologies such as Big Data/analytics, social business, and cloud means it is now easier than ever before for enterprises to provide effective services and solutions to employees who are constantly on the go, benefiting both the user and the enterprise itself. And with the delivery of increasing enterprise value viewed as a fundamental indicator of the health and wellbeing of any growing business, the significance of that latter point cannot possibly be overstated.
Increasing cash flow requires more sales, lower costs, or a mixture of both, and it stands to reason that by driving increased usage of enterprise mobility services, sales will be enhanced. Doing so with flexible and efficient service architectures may not help the top line, but it will certainly help the bottom line. Ultimately, it is the business’s responsibility to drive top-line growth by finding those services that meet the wants and needs of the relevant stakeholders, and it is the CIO’s responsibility to implement those services in smart ways by increasing individual usage of the services and leaving users wanting more.
This quest to drive enterprise value must never lose sight of the fact that end-user motivations must be a key consideration when determining how systems and services should be architected. That’s because these motivations drive their expectations and influence their tolerance of system underperformance. They are also instrumental in getting employees to initially engage enterprise services and, more importantly, use those services more once they have become acquainted with them.
End-user motivations can be categorised as intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from the perceived pleasure or joy that comes from performing a task. It allows for cognitive spontaneity and a sense of playfulness. Extrinsic motivation comes from perceived usefulness. In the case of enterprise mobility, it is the user’s subjective belief that using a specific application or system will increase his or her job performance.
The two may be thought of as competitors for an end user’s motivational drive. Certainly, one’s job expectations and hopes for career advancement, both important extrinsic motivators, will lead to the usage of tools and systems to perform responsibilities better. It is hard to trump that. But would more get done if it was fun as well? It is hard to disagree with that hypothesis, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a system that exists to satisfy the want or need of an employee will be used more if the experience is effortless or fun.
Interfaces that reinforce end-user motivation and enable enterprises to continuously modify and experiment with service offerings will create new ways to meet the needs of the consumer of those services. And as this takes place, the end user will use more services, additional scale will drive down costs, and enterprise value will increase. Such interfaces rely on the idea of ‘ubiquitous computing’, a phrase first coined by Mark Weiser way back in 1988. Weiser’s vision was for the presence of computing to recede to a point of near imperceptibility, whereby it helps the user almost without the user knowing it; and advances in sensor, location, semantic, and predictive technologies are rapidly helping to turn this fantasy into reality.
The vision of ubiquitous computing is to have computing power assist us in our normal tasks, not to take over specific tasks in our lives. This is important to enterprise users as they want to remain in control; they welcome help by unimposing computing resources. The system knows the employee needs help by ‘automatically’ understanding his/her motivation, intention, and sentiment. Much of this is built around contextual awareness, or the ability to sense and react to external environmental stimulants. Indeed, the idea of contextual awareness sits at the very heart of semantic technologies, location technologies, sensor technologies, and the ability to detect and predict intentions.
Functions and applications that exploit contextual awareness are proliferating. The availability of open source tools that can be used to facilitate context acquisition, dissemination, modelling, and reasoning is making the creation of contextual awareness easier. The steady drumbeat of technology will drive it forward, and the enterprise’s ability to determine an end user’s intent, sentiment, and desires will grow. The combination of ubiquity, networking, and context awareness will have a dramatic effect on determining the “why” of the interaction between the user and the enterprise at the point of transaction, and sometimes this is more useful than knowing the “how”.
We see every day how new technologies are changing the way that we deal with mobility, with standard product offerings like watches and glasses being turned into mobile user interfaces. Meanwhile, the growth in ubiquitous (or transparent) computing is also feeding the expansion of the use of contextual processing. Gesture and voice recognition are often cited as inputs that can be used to determine user sentiment, and offshoots of the popular Kinect game console technology are being leveraged for this very purpose. It is clear that the point of transaction between enterprise and end user is being transformed, and it is the job of both business heads and IT leaders to integrate all the available technology to ensure that enterprise mobility services are not only useful, but also effortless and enjoyable.

*The writer is group vice-president and regional managing director for the
Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC). The views expressed are his own. He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC




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