The most important aspect your mobile strategy is missing

We live in the times of mobile revolution. There need not be a discussion on this aspect. Anyone who believes we don't live in mobile revolution does not live on this planet. Let us have a peek at what the mobile revolution really means.

Almost everyone in the world has a smartphone or is thinking of buying one. There are certain segments of people who still cannot afford a decent phone but we will revisit them later. The mobile revolution is not new, people had mobile phones for a while now. Just to be clear with Mobile I mean a device which is less than 6 inches. I am not including the the Phablets and Tablets as they have larger screen size and add a complete new dimension to the mobile strategy.

Shashi Tharoor, Ex- Minister for External Affairs, had an Interesting story to share around mobile use in India. He mentions about the coconut vendors in Kerala using mobile phones to communicate with the coconut cutters sitting on the tree top. I believe this was still a much innovative use of mobile devices.

But traditional mobile computing had its limits. Monotonous display and sound, very less memory for anything. The only way to connect to the outside world was GSM (or CDMA and sometimes bluetooth). This still did not deter companies from experimenting on enterprise mobility. Text based and voice based services were very popular during the era. But the use-cases were limited and not for everyone.

Enterprise mobility began when Mobiles got connected to the cloud. The possibilities were endless. No need to worry about storage on the phone, store the data on the cloud. Facebook and Twitter brought social revolution, that rekindled the fire that maybe Mobile computing was the future. Everyone wants a Smart Phone App for everything.

The terms like BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices) started becoming the talk of the HR policies (and increase the headache of many HR personnel). As a Technical consultant, people started asking about Smart Phone. Can we build this for Smart Phone? Is it possible to build offline application? Can Smart Phone do this and that and so on and so forth.

There is however one crucial ingredient that your mobile strategy always missed. We all look at Smart Phone as an extension of computing. A carry-home-portable device. A super-computer in our pocket, while this is true, it is only half part of the story.

Smart Phone is the first seamless integration of human beings and computer. While a smart phone is a perfect extension of computing, it is also the perfect extension of human beings. Couple it with social data and Location Data, a smartphone is context aware.

One greatest example of such a feature is Google Now. It takes contextual information and gives a single window view in forms of cards on a side-panel of the phone. The information knows that I am near airport and I have a flight to catch (because the tickets are available in my Gmail), it displays the ticket code.

When talking about building Mobile application we think of it as a replacement of computer software. Can we build a standalone mobile application for the requirement? Yes we can, should we? I don't think so. You do not want your employees and consumers to constantly battle carpel tunnel syndrome in a battle to submit their latest report. Instead you can pick up their contextual data and give them a seamless data consumption device that is truly 'smart'.

Till we think in the terms of context for all our mobile, process through the data consumed by the devices and summarize it for the mobile device, we are wasting a lot of computing power to let a bird flap through pipes.