I WAS the Remote

Co-worker Rock and I often laugh about growing up in the 1960’s during the heyday of television, talking about how we were the “remote controls” — having to get up out of a chair and change the channel for a parent/sibling.

Today, Avrim Pitch penned an article about 15 common technology items today’s infants will never use.

Several years ago, we provided my sons cell phones for us to stay in touch. My eldest asked me: “Dad, what kind of cell phone did you have when you were a kid?” I laughed so hard I almost snorted my coffee, telling him I was 26 when they were invented.

The technology march is incessant. I have witnessed: a) punch cards to tape; tape to floppies; floppies to hard disk; hard disk to solid state; now the cloud; b) vinyl to tape; tape to CD, CD to MP3; c) rotary dial to touch tone; analog to digital voice; wireline to cellular; d) mainframe to mini; mini to micro; micro to smartphone; smartphone to tablet; e) command-line to GUI; GUI to touch; touch to voice; voice to gesture. (See: “Wave goodbye to how we use computers”).

The pace of change is accelerating, causing product life cycles to shorten. A result — we can be easily seduced into chasing “the shiny new object.” However, it is important to remember that our business applications should provide productivity enhancements first, wow factor second. If you can do both, you have a winner.

Caine is Able

Several years ago, I penned a blog entry entitled “Harold and the purple crayon” stating it was my favorite book because it celebrates the imagination of a child and their unbridled optimism.

Today, Forbes – as well as several thousand other media outlets – published a piece about the economic lessons to be learned from Caine’s Arcade. (If you haven’t seen the YouTube video about this young man, you owe it to yourself to spare 9 minutes and have your heart touched.)

In these times of economic gloom and doom, it is refreshing to see someone who is passionate, optimistic, and hard-working.

Imagine what is possible if we were all as able as Caine.

Push/Pull — My Mailbox is Full

We’ve been talking about the Push—Pull dilemma for some time (see: Push vs. Pull) so I was struck by the recent Techcrunch article on Push notification.

In the article, Steve Gillmor compares and contrasts how different communication technologies are used to educate, inform and elicit action. And he believes push notification technologies are a nascent trend that will have significant impact on corporate employees – sometime in the future.

The reasons are obvious: our mailboxes are overflowing – I get in excess of 400 emails a day, and it is very difficult to easily find the nuggets. Social media is a constant deluge of information – much of which is pure noise. Then there is all the general purpose and industry reading we must all do to stay current, much of which we “share” with others.

Why not a corporate “reader” that is a publishing/reading platform to inform employees and co-workers? Audience segmented, categorized, prioritized and with notification streams for critical alerts?

This becomes what Gillmor describes as the real “Big Data” and delivers real Big Value.

My Happy Place

In previous posts “Now What?”, “What Are We Waiting For?”, and “Create and Curate”  I discussed opportunities for productivity enhancements within the sales community – ways for reps to make better use of their time and how the rest of the organization can support this. This post continues the thread of ways companies can increase productivity through the use of mobile devices.

Yesterday, Sue (our CFO) forwarded a Wall Street Journal article that discusses how one can improve their leadership through Social Media. I found the article fascinating – and reinforcing – because it talked a lot about my personal habits when it comes to reading and social media. While I am a moderate contributor to social media sites (blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), I am a voracious consumer of social media content to keep informed.

My co-workers are amused at how much content I forward for their review and the odd times of the day when this is received. I read in my “down times” through the day, often up to 4 hours a day; and it is one of my “happy places” the WSJ article talks about.

This same thinking and methodology can be applied to sales reps, with some caveats. Sales reps need to be informed, and they are socially curious people. Why not support this by providing a means for them to “MONITOR” social media? You know they are curious. You know there is material out there they would benefit from. However, FDA guidance places restrictions on how social media can be used in the workforce.

The thinking is to allow for relevant social media content to be aggregated, curated, moderated and then syndicated to the sales force in a read-only fashion. This way, knowledge “nuggets” are uncovered and distributed from the social “mines”, without exposing the reps or their companies to a risky-regulatory environment.   Additionally, properly equipped, the 16% of their time they spend waiting can be converted into “happy time”.

So, again, “What are we waiting for?”

Specificity

Over the last several weeks, we have had 7 conversations with prospective customers who asked: “Is it possible to replace our laptops with iPads?”

The short answer is: not yet. Let me explain.

In a recent WSJ article the challenges of wide-scale tablet deployment are discussed. Several case studies pointed out specific problems. One is that tablets are not a universal solution for all employees. Computing devices, as with any “tool” have specific things they are good at. The same goes for application software.

Another issue is file format compatibility. One case explored the variant differences between the Microsoft Office suite and the Apple office productivity suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote). In the short term, this is probably the greatest hindrance to iPads displacing PCs.

I do believe, in the not too distant future, that tablets will evolve to become laptop devices for specific occupations; and, the key to this evolution will be occupation specific applications that are tailored to device capabilities.

In the meantime, it is important for organizations to experiment and innovate – as long as this innovation has an eye towards the future where this evolution becomes a reality.