Here are five trends that will set the bar for how business users interact with technology in order to get work done.
Wearables
Max Dufour, partner at Harmeda, and Charlene Li, founder and CEO of Altimeter Group,
both highlight the potential of wearables to perform tasks like meeting
notifications, and even give directions to the meeting room.
"Most users look up directions, print meeting invites and end up being
delayed, not knowing where a room was. It becomes even more challenging
when visiting a new office. All the pieces of paper which can be
discarded at the end of the day call for a digital solution," says
Dufour.
Li notes how, at the moment, many wearables are purpose-driven.
"The whole idea of wearables and the IoT is that they have a very
specific purpose, and right now so many of the enterprise applications
are multipurpose, focused on the things that people are doing."
The flip side to receiving information from wearable
device is putting information back into it. Getting business cards
entered into a CRM, for example, is still a huge challenge, says Li.
Internet of Things
There's a high degree of overlap between wearables and the Internet of
Things (IoT) because both are heavily dependent on sensors.
"Using beacons and sensors that trigger content on phones can be very
useful when navigating or managing large office buildings or
datacenters," says Dufour. "Over time it is also an expectation from
users to have the data come to them in a summarized and actionable
format, rather than fetching the information manually."
But,
says Li, as with wearables there must also be a way to collect and then
integrate data back into systems -- not just surface data.
Li
also notes that the user experience for IoT systems is very limited --
in part because so many devices are purpose-driven, as previously
mentioned.
Mobile
Mobile is the oldest technology in
this collection of trends. Devices like tablets and smartphones are
already commonplace in the enterprise, whether it's a company giving
employees iPhones as work phones, or using tablets to digitize some part
of the supply chain.
Going forward, employees might reason
that, if they can get a phone notification that someone liked a tweet,
they should also know whether a vital piece of machinery is running
outside of a certain threshold. Or that, if they can pull up someone's
Facebook profile, they should also be able to access business-related
information about a contact, wherever they happen to be.
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality (AR) adds a layer of information onto the world as
we experience it. On the consumer side, AR could mean looking at a
restaurant and pulling in an overlay of Yelp! reviews, while in the
enterprise it could deliver information about who you're meeting with,
or provide a means of presenting complex data that might otherwise be
difficult to handle on a regular 2D screen.
"In a 3D environment
it becomes much easier to show how a change propagates through a
non-relational database, or how an entire website is organized," says
Dufour.
Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) in business
is developing alongside gaming and entertainment, with companies using
it for product demos, marketing experiences, and more. "We already have
the computing power, software and business needs to justify further
forays in that space," says Dufour.
Some future VR use cases are
beginning to emerge There is talk about how it might be easier to
create 3D models in a virtual 3D space -- using an application like
Google's Tilt Brush, for example, which lets you select different brushes and stamps, and paint (or sculpt, really) in 3D space.
In February, Unreal Engine,
which is a collection of tools for making games, visualizations, and
simulations, demoed an addition to its Unreal Editor that would allow
for making VR inside VR. Perhaps one day it will be standard practice for those who create 3D visualisations to make them in VR.
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