Maribel Lopez: Breaking Data Silos, and the Future of Mobility

By Ian Stewart | October 12, 2012

Your iPhone’s calendar knows where you’re supposed to be, but it doesn’t know where you are. The GPS in your phone knows where you are, but not where you’re supposed to be. We have lots of data these days, but the aren’t necessarily synchronized.
 
That’s the next big step in mobile technology — combining disparate pieces of information to deliver meaningful results in real time, according to Maribel Lopez, principal of Lopez Research in San Francisco, who hosted an hour-long webinar Thursday titled “The Future of Mobile,” co-hosted with Visage Mobile.
 
With such “right-time experiences,” GPS will talk to a user’s calendar and email, for instance. The phone will know about a meeting five minutes across town, and also that you’ll never get there in time because of traffic. The phone can even send an automatic note apologizing for the delay. 
 
“This is contextual data you can get from mobile,” Lopez says. “We’re injecting context into business processes.”
 
Lopez described five cutting-edge mobile applications during the webinar that can provide rich new data, and open up new possibilities for mobile work:
 

Near-Field Communications: Lopez described how Hyatt hotels allows users with NFC-enabled smartphones to use their cell phone as a door key. In the future, NFC might have even more applications: “With NFC and location [services], when you landed, you could automatically check in to the hotel,” Lopez speculated. “Or order room service, or open doors.”
 
Augmented Reality: Already in heavy use with online video games, augmented reality offers potential to retail, providing extra product information, pricing and more. But internal business apps may get a boost from AR, as well: Imagine a service technician able to hover his phone’s camera over a piece of equipment, and have the phone serve up product information, parts history, and a training manual.
 
Mobile Point-of-Sale: Many businesses are already utilizing mobile tech to transform point-of-sale (POS) systems. Lowe’s for instance, is using iPhones as mobile POS stations. Many taxis now use Square credit card readers with an iPad or iPhone to take payments on the go.  
 
Geofenceing: “Image a situation in construction where you tie a geo-fence to a worker’s mobile phone. The geo-fence can automatically log back into the time-keeping system, and automatically log when [workers] come and when they leave.”

 
Most mobile workers today are primarily using their smartphones for calendar access, email, and contacts, not fully utilizing the potential of technology today, she said. “It’s like BlackBerry 2.0 in 2012,” Lopez says. “There’s tremendous room in the mobile market for us to move beyond the basics — really open up to new applications and services.”
 
But moving into this new mobile paradigm means taking a more proactive approach to its management, Lopez says: Defining a mobile strategy, drawing up policies and deciding what processes to make mobile first.
 
“Find quick hits, like lego pieces that can be assembled and disassembled and built into rich applications over time,” Lopez says. “At the end of the day, you want to make sure you’re data’s safe, that you’ve found a way to get your employees access to the apps you need, and see where you’re spending more money than you need to.”

More: The Future of Work: Six Technologies That Will Change the Workplace. 

Image used under Creative Commons by Flickr user Telendro.