Why is it important for digital businesses to be context aware?

As I explained in one of the previous articles, context awareness is the property of mobile devices that may be applied more flexibly in comparison with location awareness, to smartphone users. It helps in providing task-relevant information or services, improving decision making and efficiency of the tasks.

External context data, which, in almost all of its entirety is routinely incorporated into application logic (such as ODSs and MDM stores) originates from well-structured, predictable and familiar sources. These sources provide all the much-needed background for many decisions and are a cost-effective solution to adopt. But businesses are now under pressure to operate smartly and at a faster pace; hence these sources are no longer enough. They need to find new sources and make context awareness a greater priority in business applications. 

Some real world examples of context awareness

• We consider a hospital that is under pressure to reduce errors while prescribing medicines and to increase customer satisfaction. It would be helpful for them to incorporate prepared analytical data from data brokers. It would provide them with proper insights on recorded drug interactions and historical information about the patient.
• Next, we take a trucking company that needs to improve its productivity and reduce losses resulting from human errors. They can fulfill both of these objectives by gathering information about road conditions, weather, driver history, track conditions, nature of the cargo, location details, etc., and adding it to scheduling and routing decisions.
• Another scenario is a city traffic authority called upon by the government to improve the flow of the vehicles and reduce the number of road accidents. They can control and improve its outcomes by managing the timing of the traffic lights dynamically and in context, taking into consideration real-time changes in traffic and pedestrian demands, road conditions, and weather, etc.
• A financial institution always has a risk of running into money laundering schemes and other illegal transactions. If they can examine the history of parties, their partnerships and dependencies (which are often intentionally camouflaged) in real time (as transactions are processes), it significantly improves the organization’s degree of legal compliance.
• In the case of a law enforcement organization, if it can monitor sources of real-time social activities, it will be able to detect a critical situation which requires intervention before being officially alerted. The time difference between these two scenarios can be crucial, and may even be enough to prevent some unwanted activity.

But without necessary tools, these advances through contextual automation are either impossible or too expensive for most mainstream organizations to deploy.

It has become a strategic requirement for any business to become aware of the surrounding digital context in today’s modern, fast moving environment. It is imperative to be context-aware for those on the journey towards becoming digital businesses.