I use my phone all the time. Probably hundreds of times per day.
I very seldom make phone calls.
About the only reason I need a laptop is to have a keyboard for input. For just about everything else -- for content consumption and action -- if push came to shove I would choose my iPhone. I am not sure the iPad has figured out its niche yet, but somewhere in the equation has got to be the idea that for many people the most important aspect of their phone is not voice; it is its role as computing and content consumption platform. Analysts estimate that mobile devices will exceed personal computers by 2013 with global shipments of mobile devices growing 46 percent to more than 250 million in 2010.
And yet for the ECM industry, mobile content consumption and interaction with that content is still in its infancy. Want to access SharePoint on your iPhone? Good luck. There are just a handful of apps, and with reviews that are not encouraging. There seems to a lot of conversations about the potential links between Windows Mobile 7 and SharePoint. I sure hope so. I tried iShare on the iPhone and elegant is not a description that would come immediately to mind. Open Text First Class apparently has an iPhone application, and IBM recently announced the availability of Quickr and Lotus social software on the iPhone. As the convergence comes between social media/collaborative content and more traditional ECM, I think the phone (whether of the iPhone variety or the Google variety or RIM or eventually Windows Mobile 7) is going to play an increasingly important role in how one consumes that content.
CMS Watch poses the issue this way: "Does your ECM package come with its own mobile app store? In 2010, it might. Smarter phones, more bandwidth, and an increasingly mobile workplace will push the traditionally more staid document management and search vendors to develop richer mobile interfaces. Meanwhile, major enterprises (and vendors) will need to adapt their search and information access strategies in the face of mobile application search, with a new emphasis on precision over recall, and a fresh look at faceted results."
We have only begun to tap into the potential of the phone as a device to launch business processes.
Another interesting future aspect of the phone and ECM connection comes as a result of combination of the camera capabilities of a phone with the automatic generation of geographically tagged information from a phone. Take, for example, the Nationwide Insurance app on the iPhone. The app helps locate emergency services. It gathers and exchanges accident information. It stores your insurance information for easy lookup. It connects with local towing services. It records accident details and triggers the claims process. Increasingly the phone will be a way to launch and interact with content intensive processes.
A personal interest is the use the phone as a capture device. For example, ABBYY business card reader on the iPhone. On the phone (as opposed to routing the image somewhere for processing) I can do image OCR with remarkable accuracy and process the information directly into my contacts database. Pretty amazing when you think about it. Similarly, using JotNot, I can scan a full page with my scanner and convert it into a viewable image on the phone, and push it to my desktop in a variety of formats. It is only a matter of time before this kind of on the fly capture capability is integrated into business processes. Distributed capture taken to the nth degree.
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