I've just checked in, now give me a hug

Quick one as I spend the day meandering my way to the ERE Expo in San Diego, (I know, tough duty, it is expected to snow AGAIN here in Western, NY today).

Last week I finally succumbed to a little peer pressure and signed up for Foursquare. I figured with the increasing number of events I have been attending, I finally had some interesting places to check in to, and to be virtually 'seen'. Even not being on Foursquare until last week, I had seen online evidence of many of my friends and acquaintances far superior social and professional lives and figured it was time for me to get in on some of that action. 'Look at me! I go to cool places too, darn it!'

But as is the case with many of these delusions of grandeur, the reality has been quite a bit less exciting. If you have the misfortune to be my 'friend' on Foursquare, you have been treated to a steady stream of trips to the gas station, grocery store, and bagel shop. Big fun for sure.

Leaving a digital trail of the mundane is the disappointing and depressing down side of these geo-location apps. But then I stumbled upon a random tweet (apologies, I just can't remember the source), linking to a new kind of geo-location app called 'Situationist', that offers at least the chance to augment the mundane with a bit of the absurd, and the extraordinary.

Here's how the Situationist works:

1. Load the Situationist app onto your iPhone (sorry Android and BlackBerry users), along with a photo

2. When you are in proximity to other users of the Situationist app, you will be notified, and have the chance to interact with the other user in random 'situations' that you choose from a pre-seeded list on the app

3. The 'situations' can be friendly; 'Hug me for five seconds exactly', or slightly more mischievous; 'Let me inspect the contents of your bag for bombs and such.'

4. Users are allowed to request new 'Situations' be added to the app, but each one is vetted and approved before it is pushed out to the app and made available to the community

5. Hilarity and intrigue ensue, as you have random and potentially almost surreal interactions with strangers.

Why is this kind of app interesting, aside from the obvious humor?

Well, I suppose the humor might be the extent of it, but I wonder if there isn't an element of curiosity and faux-danger at play in this kind of technology that has the capacity to elevate the routine to something really fascinating and unique. When I use Foursquare to check-in to the bagel shop, I can be assured the only interesting thing that might happen is that I may suddenly be gifted with a free (small) coffee, or have a brush with really micro celebrity if the (loser) mayor happens to be in the shop when I arrive.

But if I was using the Situationist, or if Foursquare were actually fun, and the trip to the bagel shop was suddenly interrupted with someone wanting me to 'compliment them on their haircut', or to 'give them all the coins in my left front pocket'; well heck, I'd be more likely to show up and check in all over town.

I know what you might be thinking - ewwww!!! No way I would use a geo-location app to encourage creepy strangers to hug me.

You probably are too smart and careful for that. And much too savvy about how much information you openly share on the social web to buy-in to anything so crazy.

Right?

Postscript - I don't actually have an iPhone, so I can't check in anywhere using the Situationist yet. So tomorrow when I finally get to ERE Expo and check in on Foursquare, I am encouraging anyone who sees the check-in to approach me and offer to hug me for five seconds exactly. 

Or three seconds if you are a little weird.

Postscript II - How about a recruiting/networking version of the app? One that lets the passive job seeker send out that 'Hey, I am really interested in talking about a new gig, corner over near the bar and let's talk'.

Where's the Employee Handbook again?

Although I recently took a bit of a swipe at the Apple iPad, even I would be foolish to deny the current and certainly near-future impact that the iPad and increasingly other tablet devices like the BlackBerry PlayBook and even the Motorola Xoom will have on the enterprise IT landscape.BlackBerry PlayBook

Whether it is the potential for Apple to support the creation of restricted and IT-managed enterprise App stores, the emergence of third-party tools to facilitate the development and distribution of company created and approved apps, or the likely shift from one size fits all enterprise portals to more individually created and defined tablet or smartphone environments, there is clearly a growing trend towards more specialization, personalization, and well, I hate to say it again, consumerization of enterprise systems.

With the continuing proliferation of smartphone ownership in the US and elsewhere, and the preferred and accepted means for accessing, consuming, and creating content on these devices (and their tablet cousins), it seems apparent that any forward-thinking organization would start to strategize and develop its own response to this 'appification' of information consumption. 

When an employee sends an email or makes a call to the HR support desk because they can't seem to locate a copy of the company bereavement leave policy, (leaving aside the certainly questionable decision to even have such a policy, 'two days for an Uncle' - absurd), the typical response from the HR administrator will almost certainly be one of the following:

1. All the HR policies can be found on the shared Network drive, just navigate to:

J:/Corporate/Resources/Employee Resources/Information/Policy/Staff/PTO/Bereavement.doc

2. The bereavement policy is sub-bullet 4 of the overall Time-Off Policy, just find the PTO policy. If you don't want to page down through all 39 pages, just do a search for 'death'

3. The bereavement policy is in the Employee Handbook you were given on your first day.  What's that? You started in 1997?  You didn't save your copy? 

4. What is your email? I can email you the latest copy of the policy.  Make sure to archive it though, since the file is 8MB, it will take a big chunk out of your email storage allotment.

You get the idea.  While many forward thinking organizations have rightfully moved beyond this state of affairs and deployed searchable, personalized portals for employees, even more haven't.  For those organizations still struggling with file shares, dead Sharepoint installs, and mainly sending file attachments around in email; the next few years will present both a choice and a challenge.

Figure out a way to adopt yesterday's technologies to solve today's problems, or try to see past the current state, anticipate both where the market for tablets and smartphones is heading, coupled with the needs of your anticipated workforce mix (will they be more geographically diverse, more mobile, younger), and develop and deploy technologies and more accurately, build methods to support your organizations with the needed information how and where they are most apt to consume it effectively and efficiently.

In three years when that same employee rings up asking 'Where can I find the bereavement policy?', chances are the savviest HR organizations will answer:

Employee Policies?  There's an app for that.  It should be on the home screen of your PlayBook. Open up the app, and search for 'ludicrous', it should take you straight there.

Experience Management

I had my first and only hands-on iPad experience yesterday, and it was unquestioningly crappy.

The scene - I was in the Delta departure area at JFK airport in New York City, with an hour or so to kill before my flight.  Near the gate was a small seating area with tables and benches, with mini-walls or partitions in which were embedded Apple iPads.  The idea being travelers could access information and services (check flight status, weather, news, order a club sandwich and a Toblerone, etc.) using the iPad screen.Better than an iPad?

Really a neat idea, right?  Information and services a mere touch screen away, and using the hottest tech device to come on the scene in years.  

So what happened when I tried my hand at this wondrous device (again, while I have seen and heard about the iPad ad nauseam, I had never actually tried one out).  

It was an altogether unsatisfying experience. The device was exceedingly slow. Many of the apps did not respond at all.  The ones that did, (news, weather) seemed to hang endlessly waiting for the information to refresh. And quite honestly, flight status was readily available on the ‘normal’ airport monitors, and I could look outside to check out the weather.

The one and only thing that I really wanted to do, check my email, lead me into a hard sell for some kind of recurring deal for Boingo internet access.  And one other thing, the sun was glaring in at such an angle that it made the iPad screens really tough to read, not that it really had much information anyway.

No big deal really, the airport is just trying to offer a new service, generate some additional revenue, and mounting iPads in the waiting area is probably a good idea.  And on another day, without the technical issues, the sun, and my general crabbiness I might have left there and marched straight to the Apple store to buy myself the iPad.  

But instead, I was left with a less than favorable experience. Who is at fault? Hard to know. But it feels like Apple, JFK, Delta, and Boingo all sort of conspired to deliver the suck. It is great for Apple to sell a bunch of iPads to Delta or whomever owns them, but I wonder if they care at all if their ‘coolest in the world device’ is being used to deliver such a lousy service message and experience.  

I guess the question is once you ship a product, design a service, or otherwise offer your concepts and ideas to the market, how much do you need to care about how your work gets presented by third parties to the eventual consumers of your efforts?  I imagine it depends on what you are really selling, just a product,  or an entire experience that your product enables, and the extent to which you can and desire to manage those end user experiences.

I am sure the iPad is a fantastically wonderful life-altering device, my mistake was expecting an airport to deliver the experience the way Apple designed it to be delivered.

Situational Awareness

Your environment, the activities in which you are engaging, and the people that you are with, impacts and influences your ability and desire to respond to and interact with the constant demands for your time and attention. This is becoming increasingly important as the number and diversity of communication avenues increase,No, not that kind of Situation and how in the smartphone generation, the tendency to be always connected to these tethers has become common and expected.

That was a really long winded way of saying essentially this:

1. There are loads of ways (email, phone, SMS, social networks), in which we interact with our colleagues, friends, and family (and the public)
2. These various mechanisms differ widely in how we respond to them, (an urgent text message from a family member gets an immediate response)
3. Different and sometimes overlapping social circles utilize these mechanisms in varying ways, (work colleagues email us on one account, while almost anyone on Twitter can send an '@' message directed to us)
4. We constantly assess and adjust our ability and preferences for receiving and responding to these messages based on our situation, (we turn off our phones when in a parent-teacher conference, or we may only respond to LinkedIn invites once a week)

Some directives and adjustments are simple -  silencing our phones in a movie theater. While others are more complex and subtle -attending a conference presentation but wanting to remain available for urgent messages from the office or from family members, while ignoring personal email or messaging from various social networks. In all cases, managing the multitude of communication channels and our ability to respond gets more complex all the time.

Recently mobile communications supplier Nokia released a prototype application named 'Situations', designed to help Nokia smartphone users attempt to manage these channels and contexts more effectively, and after some initial configuration, automatically. 'Situations' allows the user the configure various contexts like 'In a meeting', or 'Concert', and set up corresponding phone behaviors like setting the phone to vibrate only, allowing only selected contact group calls to ring through, or auto-responding to text messages with a 'situationally appropriate' response. 

Nokia 'Situations' screen images below:

 

While the current capability of Nokia 'Situations' is basically limited to 'core' phone functions like ringer behavior, text messaging, and basic calendaring, it probably is not too far-fetched to see an application that takes this functionality one better and integrates with personal and corporate email, enterprise and public social networks, and whatever new mechanisms for connection and communication emerge over time. Today, we configure messaging and notification rules for these channels one by one, and no technology I am aware of lets us consolidate these rules and overlay context and situational awareness to refine the rules.

There is much talk about information overload, and while in the aggregate that might be true what seems to be more important to address the overload is the ability to segment, sort, and intelligently respond to the incoming stream of messages based on the situational context of type of message, relationship to the message sender, and augmented by our physical surroundings. 

For smartphones to be truly smart, they should be able to do more than continuously beep, ring, vibrate, and poke us with incoming message after message, they ought to be able (with a little coaching), to do some initial screening for us.

Don Draper has a secretary sitting outside his office doing the screening for him.  The rest of us need some help, and the idea behind the Nokia 'Situations' app I think represents the next evolution in this process.