It’s 2011 — and mobile devices are flying off the shelves faster than ever before. It’s time for the real mobile revolution!

Except…

Let’s Face It…

You Aren’t Ready for This.

I don’t mean YOU. I mean your organization, and your infrastructure. And the direction the culture and technology of your organization has been headed for a long time.

Look around at the systems and applications you’re probably using right now.

From an IT perspective: If you’ve created any internally developed applications, more than likely, they aren’t web-based, or if web-based, are stand-alone apps with their own unique, browser and window-size specific display properties, and a dependency on a platform-specific technology such as ActiveX or for that matter, Internet Explorer.

From a user perspective: With a wide variety of systems in daily use, it’s likely you have multiple logins to juggle. Perhaps these systems grew up independently of each other, and the mandate was “we have to get this working now — just make it work!” End result? Credentials are stored in many different locations, with different requirements for both username formatting and password strength/standards.

From an IT Security perspective: In the recent economic downturn, Single Sign On (SSO) is a project that has never been prioritized, as it’s “merely” a productivity issue, and doesn’t have the big bang cost reduction, nor the direct revenue creation that has driven all decisions recently. Pre-econolypse, things were too good to worry about SSO, as the “inconvenience” of multiple logins wasn’t an issue in the face of (relatively) easy money.

From a Web Developer perspective: Any web expertise that might already exist in-house, is unlikely to have multiple platform, touch-oriented user interface experience (almost nobody outside of commercially shipping products does, after all), and the ramp up to create usable let alone useful mobile apps is only a glimmer in your most cutting edge designer/developers eyes. If only he/she wasn’t so busy working to make sure your web apps still worked on IE6 — there would be time to address cutting edge mobile tech, front- and rear-facing cameras and 4G networks.

From a cultural perspective: As much as we want to embrace the always-on, mobile, multi-tasking capabilities of the consumer web, we’re comfortable with “the way we’ve always done it here” — that’s our culture and what made us successful! Why change now?

From a manager perspective: I didn’t get to this position by wanting to hear everyone else’s opinion. I got here by clawing my way to the top, the way Machiavelli always intended. Now you want to democratize decision making so everyone has a voice? What’s the point of being a company man, if everyone gets a say?

Now of course all of these are stereotypical extremes… perhaps.

Even in the worst economic times of anyone currently alive — it’s all too easy to “stay the course” — even if the ship is repeatedly bashing into icebergs, while we claim to be unsinkable.

Is that the sane course? Is that the way to get to revenue growth? Employee engagement? Customer satisfaction? Loyalty?

Are you ready to start seriously questioning whether the mobile future you claim you want is possible given where you’ve put your focus to date?

Throwing iPads at systems that aren’t made to be easy to use, and accessible in the “micro bursts” (seconds to minutes rather than hours of use at a time) that mobile use typifies, is only going to result in pain for everyone.

Prepare yourself. It is going to take work to unwind the past and pave the future. But the possibilities? Endless. But only if you take the steps to move forward.

Are you ready?

Photo credit: Bastografie / photocase.com

Recently, Robin Bew, Chief Economist in the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research division of The Economist magazine, posted the results of an EIU survey of large businesses.

With such a complex system as the world economy, I always have my doubts as to how useful research like this is, but an interesting statistic called out was:

Companies today earn a third of their revenues from overseas. In two years time that figure will have grown to 60%.

This information impacts the way I’m currently advising clients in at least two ways:

• If digital media is the primary marketing/communication vehicle world wide, and 33-60% of your revenue is likely to come from sources other than your own country, and therefore that media is likely to be consumed (in the case of US-based companies) in some other language than English… do you have a strategy to support multi-lingual content? At all? Without excessive costs and time delays for translation and localization? If not, what revenue, cost, and competitive opportunities are you missing?
  • Due to crowdsourcing techniques, and better, faster, cheaper and more directly integrated translation technology/workflow, it has never been easier to address this opportunity – but it does require the existing technical infrastructure and business-savvy to put together an intelligent content pipeline. If you have not looked into this in the last few years, you will be astonished by what is possible and at what price tag.
• Consumer and business behavior is not the same, worldwide. With an innovation hat on, do you really understand the needs of your ultimate customers, wherever they may live? Are your “innovations” user and need focused? (rather than product/company-focused, or “purely” demographics-focused)
  • Adoption of mobile technology, for example, and “smartphones” specifically, tends to lead in the United States, even though the cellular networks of the US lag behind other countries that have significantly greater (and cheaper) internet speeds. (This according to contacts I have in telecom – non-publishable/citeable stats).
  • Serving mobile customers (or employees, partners, suppliers) is still a dramatically underserved area – whether a smartphone or a “dumb” phone. There are many opportunities to think out of the retail store “box” (quite literally the “big box” stores), and traditional non-interactive media. Customer engagement, service, satisfaction, price-checking, order checking, etc., is still quite disconnected from the online vs. offline experience – even 15 years after the rise of the web. There is a real opportunity to leap beyond ignorance of the full power of the web on the desktop, and straight into the much faster growing world of mobile content and applications.

Have you looked far enough to see and act on these opportunities?

Whether you believe the rest of the macroeconomic and microeconomic predictions/analysis of The Economist or any other source – I don’t see any easy way to ignore the two above trends. Almost every inquiry which has come in to us in the last few months has been explicitly focused on these two areas – and the convergence/integration of these trends into the siloed infrastructure that most organizations have in place.

Converging and integrating to set the stage for rapid growth opportunities seems to finally be a consensus opportunity to power out of the economic troubles of the last 1-2 years (depending on industry and location). Both the cutting edge adopters and the laggards are running as fast as they can to take advantage of these opportunities… is your organization?

No Strategy = Less (No?) Opportunity

Are you ready? What have you done to prepare? Seen compelling reasons *not* to look at multi-lingual or mobile implications for your organization?

It’s the battle against paper and electronic, and guess who leads the race?

According to the HBR Daily Stat (and the original source, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística):

It’s a national census of hundreds of millions of people across 8 million square kilometers, using a workforce of 230,000 and a budget of $1.4 billion. The 2010 U.S. Census? No, it’s Brazil’s 2010 census. The current U.S. headcount, by contrast, requires 3.8 million workers and $14 billion. Census takers in Brazil use PDAs and laptops; those in the U.S. still rely mainly on paper (originally reported by CNN in the 2009 run-tup/testing for the 2010 census). – Source: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatístic

This Daily Stat, coming the week just after Apple’s big iPad launch (reported to have sold 300,000 in the first day of sales, April 3rd, 2010), is a bit shocking to me, as someone who has been involved in digital content for over 15 years.

And it’s not because paper is the devil (although it frequently is, that’s another story for another day) – but because the cost savings and flexibility that could have easily been had, were dropped on the floor. What happened?

One Giant Step for Consumers, A Faceplant for Government

Sometimes government lags, and sometimes it leads – but maintaining parity with the commercial world, or for that matter a far less technologically developed country, would seem to be, well, obvious.

The US, being one of the largest commercial markets for smartphones, one would think would be a natural place to use what would seem to be a completely natural fit for the Census mission. GPS-enabled, off-the-shelf, 3G-powered, mobile devices, with local storage for data collection (or problematic coverage areas), and web-enabled connections to the back office – well,  just about any mobile device available on any network conceivable in the US would fit the bill.

Seeking Good Enough vs. Purpose-built

What happened? Nearly every teenager, let alone adult seems to have a smartphone that would fit the needs of Census taking. So how hard could it be to extend this to a once in 10 year project?

It seems the US Census Bureau made the classic Innovator’s Dilemma mistake, of aiming for a “perfect” single purpose-built device, which, as anyone familiar with classic (and misunderstood) “Waterfall Development” vs. “Agile Development” or for that matter “Custom Built” vs. “Configure and Integrate” could have seen coming.

While there is more to the end-to-end system of Census data collection than the upfront collection process (whether electronic or by paper), the fast-moving mobile industry appears to have caught Harris Corp. on the slow lane.

The bureau’s GPS saga began in 2006, the bureau hired Harris Corp. (HRS, Fortune 500), based in Melbourne, Fla., to develop 151,000 handheld computers equipped with GPS software, as well as the technical infrastructure to support the count. – Source: CNN

In 4 years, a lot has changed in the mobile/smartphone world – and it’s safe to say that the consumer world has led the charge here, hence the rise of the iPhone, Droid, Palm Pre, and more.

Watch Brazil

In contrast to having custom devices built, Brazil partnered with LG, one of the rising stars in the mobile world:

Brazil will start taking its population census in the second half of this year and to ensure a smooth and efficient counting, the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE) has roped in LG to supply 150,000 GM750 phones.

The phones will facilitate surveyors to take a population count on the Windows Mobile 6.5 powered phone along with the support of MS Office, web browsing etc. The phone unlike the retail version will sport MS’ honeycomb UI.

It is ruggedized (see photo), with it’s own app (not hardware), but otherwise, the core phone itself, is a phone anyone with $100 could buy at the corner mobile store.

The question is not paper or not paper – it’s what gets the job done, better, faster, cheaper (and yes, you can have all three)

By not doing this step electronically, the bureau is missing the opportunity to streamline its operations, said Hermann Habermann, a former deputy director of the Census Bureau. If workers had handhelds, they could more quickly receive updates on which residences have mailed back forms and more easily send back the completed online forms. – Source: CNN

Smartphones and real-time make the loop from the field to the back office far more efficient, and can allow the Census Bureau to target much more precisely. The end impact on local US Citizens?

The technology (would also help) better identify which Census tract a home is in, a crucial fact in determining an area’s representation in Congress and the distribution of more than $435 billion in federal funds every year.

Until now, the Census Bureau usually puts about 5% of residences in the wrong tract. With the GPS, it is aiming to reduce that error rate to 0.5%, said Daniel Weinberg, assistant director for the decennial census. – Source: CNN

Unfortunately, with the fall back to paper, the error rate is likely to remain, as is the (inadvertent) mis-distribution of funds.

Incidentally, Carl Frappaolo wrote about similar issues in paper vs. electronic filing with the IRS in his frequently referenced post “ECM – From Here to Eternity.” e-Filing rates (as percentage of total submissions) has since gone up, but continues to remain the anomaly rather than the norm.

Watch your peers, watch the technology trends – and be prepared to be disrupted.

If you have any other disruptive innovation tales (of success or woe), weigh in here – these waves can come fast, and it’s all hands on deck!

Team-based Innovation

Let me suggest you Take a Day to Innovate (with our 1 to 2 Day Innovation Workshop) – and you stand a much greater chance of avoiding issues like those that the US Census Bureau faced.

Do you have the right people on your innovation team? Do they have best innovation skills to create and deliver on the innovations they need?

As computing power increases, “mashable” and findable data/content grows, GPS shrinks, partnerships and individual innovation explore, and it all comes together in the form of a handheld device like the iPhone, Blackberry, and myriad Androids being rolled out on a weekly basis, we continue to see the rise of applications that only a few years ago seemed the stuff of science fiction.

Ladies and Gentleman, it’s the mobile content economy – and it’s going to impact your business one way or another. Isn’t it time get prepared?

The latest indication of this is Siri – Your Mobile Virtual Assistant.

Smartphones are not new, speech recognition is not new, but the concentration of power/content/data and location with contextual, “geographically smart” speech recognition, opens up interesting possibilities.

View the demo below (or download the app to your iPhone or Blackberry), before going on…

Just as with the business models of travel sites such as Orbitz, or Kayak, and similar meta-aggregators or “meta businesses” – new business model innovation is afoot!

It turns out that being *the* aggregation point for information, even given away for “free” (as far as the user is concerned at least), is quite the healthy business model.

The trick is to:

• Do it well = user experience and usability
• Do it with completeness = solid data/content partners
• Make it idiot proof = semantically smart speech recognition
• And not to presume that as the, in this case, mobile app provider, you have to create and own it all yourself.

Siri uses licensed data from allmenus.com, Google Maps, City Search, Taxi Magic, MovieTickets.com, OpenTable, eventful, Gayot, livekick, WeatherBug, BooRah, Rotten Tomatoes, Yahoo! Local, yelp, FlightStats, Vlingo and TrueKnowledge, and licenses the speech recognition engine of Nuance, and combines it into a self-contained application that is, as they say, a “person-centric app.”

It’s essentially the mobile generation of the “Single Point of Access” or Portal that had been all the rage in the 90s – it’s the “Personal Portal” – hyper-localized, and personalized, as it always should have been.

Of course in testing the application, there seem to be some data gaps, and some taxonomy work that needs to be done (hint: a wrap = burrito here in Boston, and vice-versa), but all told, it’s a sign of the mobile times to come.

Where to from here?

How are YOU approaching digital content strategies for a mobile world?

Is  your business found in the content/data aggregators for your market?

Is your business “socially connected” to applications like FourSquare and Gowalla

In short, are you leaving money on the table for your competitors to run off with? It’s early days, but disruptive innovation wins go to those who start the trend first, unless you’re an extremely fast follower.

Weigh in with your thoughts and concerns – and while we don’t do app development, at Information Architected, “there’s a consulting service for that!” (Need digital content strategy for your enterprise? Get in touch.)

What if… you could see the information flowing all around you?

What if… you could overlay that “information reality” over “normal reality?”

Some are calling this “augmented reality” while those of you who have seen the movie “The Matrix” might recognize this as, well, The Matrix (which Morpheus will explain below, if you don’t already know the movie).

While I hinted at a similar phenomenon via the “Near Real-time Babelfish” article last week, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that just as many of us can’t recall what it was like to not be able “to google” (and Amazon as a mobile product search agent) the InterWebs for almost anything you can think of, the more power we pack into our mobile devices, and the more often we are connected rather than disconnected from the nework (aka Matrix), the closer we’re coming to a complete blurring of the lines as to what is reality and what is “just information.”

Given the information that YOUR organization is creating every day, or that your customers are creating while using your services, are you taking advantage of this information in a mobile application or other mashup? Enterprise 2.0 isn’t strictly about conversations and communities, but about freeing all data/information/knowledge into new uses, via standards and transparency into sources, that allow new “information model innovations” (as opposed to business model innovations, new product innovations, or any of the many typical views of innovation from the past).

Leverage your digital information, or prepare to watch your competitors blow past you and retain/expand that lead. People laughed when Amazon first unveiled itself, and now they not only own the digital content and physical goods world, but have become the backbone of the vast majority of Web 2.0 companies, and much of the infrastructure of organizations attempting (to various degrees) to do Enterprise 2.0.

Is your Information Architected for mashups? Is your Information Architected for 2.0? Is your Information Architected for Findability? Regardless of how the information is accessed? Wired, wireless, mobile, smartphone, netbook, kiosk, Xbox 360, etc.? What shackles have you inadvertently thrown around your content by not planning for access from anywhere, anytime?

Interested in hearing what you or your organization has done to make the most of digital information and access. What are your stories of success or failure?

If you have a current project, or are planning a project to take advantage of the rapidly expanding capabilities of electronic content, innovations in display, access, findability, collaboration and more – get in touch with us at 617-933-9655 or 617-933-2584 to discuss what aspect of consulting, training or our integrated, consultative training practice would be the most effective and efficient way to jump-start your project.

The Babel Fish is “small, yellow, leech-like, and is a universal translator which simultaneously translates from one spoken language to another. When inserted into the ear, its nutrition processes convert sound waves into brain waves, neatly crossing the language divide between any species you should happen to meet whilst travelling in space.”

Put simply, insert the Babel fish into your ear, and you can both speak and understand any language.

No Universal Language in a “Flat World” (yet)

As the World Gets Flat (or small, as I prefer to think of it, no offense to Thomas Friedman), the lines between countries begin to blur, as technology makes it easier than ever to ship work to the lest expensive locations for any given task.

However, whatever barriers low-cost telecommunications and a rising variety of skilled workforce around the world, language remains a barrier to companies wishing to actually DO business globally (witness some of the horror stories of “call centers gone bad” in the rush to outsourcing and offshoring), as well as to the individual global traveller who, as it turns out, may not speak multiple languages.

Just announced this week for the iPhone as well as Blackberry is a set of new apps from Sakhr Software USA, which provides “Speech to Speech” mobile translation, enabling live communication between English and Arabic speakers. This newest offering combines Sakhr’s Arabic text-to-speech (TTS), speech recognition, and translation technology in a mobile environment.

While the average iPhone or Blackberry user may not have access to this solution yet, nor be able to afford it (price unknown, but largely, this is targeted at the intelligence, defense and political/diplomatic worlds), the fact that the technologies and techniques necessary to accomplish this task have come this close to being able to put near real-time translation in your ear (bud), is quite incredible.

It’s not quite the “real-time” translation as described by the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but we’re getting ever closer.

Going Digital, and Going Mobile are two powerful forces in the world these days. Are you doing everything that you can to take advantage of these trends?

Is Your Information Architected for a Flat World?

Two recommended actions to take to be prepared to outrun your competition in a Flat World:

• Our Integrated Consulting and Training on Electronic Content Management (ECM) or
• Our one- to two-day course on Innovation Management

Whether your organization is large or small, local or global, now is the time to take advantage of the possibilities available in moving work around the world, delivering content in any conceivable format, collaborating globally, and at the lowest costs and smallest form factors ever seen.

How are YOU taking advantage of the Flat World? Let’s discuss.