September 23, 2009, 5:08 PM — By now, companies that have put business applications on smartphones or other handheld devices know of the competitive advantages they can gain. The more detailed and relevant the information at hand, the greater the opportunity an employee has to close a sale, improve delivery times -- or even save a life.
But these are early days for enterprise mobility, and most companies stop short of realizing its full potential. While they may be delivering customer relationship management information, field service updates and other critical data to mobile devices, they're probably not delivering as much relevant information to users as they could.
To make the data more relevant, context awareness is key. In a context-aware environment, wireless devices such as environmental sensors, radio frequency identification tags and smartphones send location, presence and other status information across the network. Specialized software captures, stores and analyzes the data, sending it back over the network to provide context at the end device as needed.
"Context-aware computing has one exciting future," says William Clark, a Gartner Inc. analyst. By 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives, he predicts, noting that mobility is a subset that accounts for 80% of the context-aware field.
Think of context in this way: "It is something that can help people or other systems make decisions faster," says Chris Thompson, senior director of mobility solutions at Cisco Systems Inc. "The vision for context awareness is to expose as much of this sensory information as possible to business applications so it can be correlated with existing business roles."
Context-aware technology is available from companies such as Agito Networks Inc., Appear Networks Inc. and Cisco.
"For me, it's a no-brainer that context will become by default a requirement for mobile solutions," says Sébastien Fabre, head of innovation and planning at SITA, an airline IT provider based in Geneva.
Finding Supplies
Some of the earliest context-aware mobility projects have involved the integration of location information into wireless applications. For example, Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare Inc. (TMH) in Florida has been using location services to track assets since 2006, says Jay Adams, the health care provider's IT enterprise architect.
Context on Ice
At Pittsburgh's Mellon Arena, home of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the National Hockey League's 2009 Stanley Cup champions, some fans got a little something extra last season: live-action video streamed to their smartphones or other mobile devices.
Showing respect for their true-blue fans, the Penguins call this feature "Yinzcam" -- "yinz" is Pittsburgh-ese for "y'all." The Yinzcam is the brainchild of Priya Narasimhan, an avid Penguins fan and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Pittsburgh's own Carnegie Mellon University. Narasimhan co-directs the school's CyLab Mobility Research Center, where she and her students are studying how context affects the mobile experience.
The researchers set up a Wi-Fi network at the arena and offered season ticket holders the opportunity to access Yinzcam from their mobile phones. Fans could use Wi-Fi-enabled devices to select and watch live video feeds from unique camera angles, as well as view and create their own instant replays and compile personalized content such as game-time information and player bios.
Particularly popular were the bench-cam, the goalie-cam and the "follow Evgeni Malkin"-cam, Soltesz says. Malkin, a center from Russia, is one of the team's more popular players.
Because of the success of the pilot, the Penguins have committed to deploying Yinzcam at a new arena expected to open in 2010, says Dave Soltesz, senior vice president of sales for the Penguins.
"The cool thing is what we see happening to the fan experience," Soltesz says. "Someone with an iTouch is doing a replay and poking the guy in the next seat saying, 'Did you see this?'"
As of this spring, TMH had tagged about 2,700 medical and wireless devices and updated the wireless infrastructure to make it possible to track supplies anywhere in its 800,000-square-foot hospital. Now information about an item's location is accurate to within four feet, Adams says. Using an asset-tracking application called MobileView 4 from AeroScout Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., nurses can locate equipment like IV pumps by drilling down to floor maps that were imported into the Cisco Mobility Services Engine (MSE) and then delivered to MobileView 4.
