Ted Schadler from Forrester spoke on Wednesday at the AIIM Conference in a talk called “Provisioning Today’s Information Worker”  on the subjects of content and mobile.   What follows is my notes on the talk.

75% of all content retrieved by IBM is tagged content retrieval (which indicates both how important tagging is, how effective it can be, and how mature IBM is in the use of tagging).

Content is right at the core of all information work.  It is the medium of exchange while mobile is the new face of engagement.  Your mobile app is in your customer’s pocket.  It won’t do to simply have a screen scrape of your web site ported to the mobile environment.  What are you going to do?

He presented a slide showing how dramatically the world has changed since 2007, only 5 years ago.  At that time there was no iPhone, no iPad, no app store.  The smart phone era has grown from essentially zero to 1 billion devices in 5 years!  700 million people participate in social networks.

Email is becoming your father’s Oldsmobile.

There was a perfect storm brewing.  Mobiles apps are at the center of it all.  Showed a blood pressure app that plugs into iPhone. Another of a bathroom scale that plugs into the iPhone.  It is a reformation of engagement.  We all need to be thinking differently how we engage customers and employees.  Stop thinking about it as a technology problem.

Architecture start with the systems of record in the middle,  building out from that.  They don’t host processes, but instead serve people.  That is where the benefit is, and where the loyalty lies.  Empowers with context rich apps.  Instead of accessing a web form and entering a bunch of information in order to get stuff, users will simply open phone and it will already know what it needs to know to get you want you want.  That is what is different about this new mobile centric approach.

He spoke about Trip-It and how useful it is for managing everything while traveling.

In the midst of all this amazing capability and advancement, beware the Jabberwok of success.  Cloud services (Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Salesforce, and Box) are showing dramatic increases in percentage of traffic from smartphones.   When USAA launched their mobile app, they predicted 22 million mobile contacts a year, but it was so popular with this customer base, which includes a lot of service people around the world, that they got nearly six times that amount, 120 million, causing quite unexpected load on the servers.

We should not design the systems inside-out as they have been in the past.  Instead of designing processes around the way we think about the value and flow of information, we must instead think about how customers thinks of the value and flow of information.  Systems need to be designed primarily to support the mobile customer. Development processes need to change, be more agile.  Mobile will get people to think differently about those content systems, so they will be available on mobile devices.

Mobile is becoming the tail that wags the IT dog.

You choose: enabling or empowering.  Here are some steps or design criteria you should follow:

1. Form a center of excellence that bridges between business and It, Use mobile as the driver.
2. Design for mobile first.  Many have tried to take what they already had on the web site, and shrink down to the mobile format, but that did not work.  It did not leverage what is available in the mobile platform, nor meet the expectations of the users.  Instead, start with design for mobile.  It is then much easier to make available on bigger platforms.  It takes a different mindset.
3. Start with mapping the tasks of mobile users, and then match the resources to that.  He showed a graphic of processes in the travel industry.   On one side what the big thick heavy traditional processes.  The other side had a traveler timeline which had a multitude of touch points into the middle of the traditional processes.  Mobile requires you to think of the granularity of the task.  People check their status many many times, all the time. This hits a lot of back end systems.  Back end systems need to be re-conceived to make this information available in a more real time way.
   Can you do it on prem?  Not really.  Cloud is a huge benefit in offering all time on instant access.
4. Deploy you customer interface over the app internet to reach a billion mobile devices.
5. Task oriented design meets mobile reality.  He feels that hybrid of native capabilities along with HTML5 will win in the near term.
6. Assemble an Engagement Platform to support task oriented mobile apps.  Consider using technologies like Hadoop, OpenID Connect.

Key points to remember:

• Design for mobile first
• Collaboration should be built into every application, Social is part of the information workplace
• Get to the cloud
• BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) means lots of hassle, but it is the only way
• Social tagging may be best way to find and organize relevant content.  Leverage the social contribution to content. This has to happen to all content systems.