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High Mobility Working

Today my work took me to four different places. First up was the VLC office in Utrecht. For me this is ‘home’ and a great place to meet coworkers. After some emailing and phone calls I went to our VLC office in Amsterdam for a quick meeting with the delivery manager for my project. This was unexpected for him as we planned to have a conference call. But for me it was on the way to my next appointment. Meetings in person always seem to be more productive. For this meeting this surely was the point as we could do some pre-evaluation stuff.

After that I went back on the road to meetup and lunch with a New World of Work Friend. We discussed a new initiative I am working and got some valuable feedback and ideas. We had not spoken since my move to VLC and until now we had not had the chance to talk about his work more in depth so we talked about our companies and the work we are doing.

My last stop was at Qlikview where we had a very productive problem solving session for one of our customers. We really were hitting the right vibe and we came up with some new fixes and ideas!

For me this was a high mobility workday where I worked on four locations. My documents, email and schedules are 100% in the cloud. This is great but requires access to the cloud to work 😉

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Nokia and Microsoft, a match made in heaven?

To me it looks like the teamup between Nokia and Microsoft is a deal that should help both turning around a losing spiral for the better. Nokia is losing ground and Microsoft still is working hard to get mobile going. Will the new team succeed?

One big difference between the new alliance and Apple is that the announcement is paper-only! Apple only announces new stuff when they have something to show. Nokia/Microsoft did not show a new smartphone with Windows Mobile 7. If that is going to take then another 6 months to make, I am affraid, all momentum will be lost…

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Work and Mobile

Yesterday I was at momo#7 and although it was very interesting afterwards I figured out that this was beyond my borders of enterprise 2.0. At this moment in time mobility is more a consumer oriented movement and less a work related issue. Yuri van Geest hit this issue on the spot, although I suspect this was unintended. He mentioned that mobile has to be about fun and games and not about work. Implying that work is no fun. But I guess reading his twitter stream that he had lots of fun at work 😉 And all of us would agree that work had to be (more) fun!

I see two applications of mobile in the work area. The first is the use of consumer apps in a business setting. Booking a train on a mobile app (I did this on my way to momo), making a hotel reservation, using google maps on the iPhone to get to an appointment, etc. There are tuns of stuff people do in a business setting aswell as in a private setting.

The second application I see is the mobile access to the enterprise information systems. The most obvious is email, which is already used by lots of businesspeople. I already saw a salesforce.com iPhone app to use this piece of business software on a mobile device. I can access our sharepoint portal through my mobile, using a specific mobile URL. One of the design principles for web 2.0 is about the multidevice aspect. Webapps should be made for multiple apps including mobile to make more use of your app. I think that the same principle applies for enterprise 2.0, and that there is a great future for this principle!

So you see I am in discussion with myself on this topic! On the one hand moblie is more about consumer market than the business market but the chances are there! The topic of value in mobile is even harder in the business market. How can a company make a business case for using mobile devices and apps in a business context? Productivity and responstimes are likely to be better but to what extend? I am using an iPhone and I got the feeling I am more productive on the road, but find it hard to quantify this. On the other hand budgets on ICT are a lot bigger in the business world, so that will make a difference.

I am guessing we will see more and more mobile apps in a business context and people will love them! For my point of view of enterprise 2.0, I will just see it as a channel and leave the further development of this interesting movement to others, like the terrific momo crew! But I feel this subject will be continued even in this blog…