Content Management and the Desktop Manufacturing Revolution

I had the opportunity recently to attend a keynote by Chris Anderson, the former chief editor of Wired magazine and now CEO of 3D Robotics and author of books such as The Long Tail and Makers. His inspiring presentation was about the advent of 3D printing which he says will revolutionize manufacturing and ultimately change our lives the same way computers did. Just as desktop publishing and desktop printers revolutionized printing and as computers changed music recording, video production, photography, publishing, and other creative activities, manufacturing of physical objects will go through a similar disruption as a result of “desktop manufacturing”.

Chris Anderson

Let’s be clear, 3D printing is still in its infancy. What you can create on the $1,000-$2,000 home printers are mostly some cheesy plastic toys with little practical use. Even the professional grade 3D printers which cost many thousands of dollars are very much limited by the choice of materials, colors, and shapes. But Mr. Anderson is making the point that the first desktop printers were also quite limited in what they could deliver. Just a decade or so later, however, the laser and inkjet printers could handle photo-grade colors and resolutions at a very affordable price. Based on that, we should see some amazing manufacturing capacity in every office and every home within a decade!

What I find interesting about the desktop manufacturing revolution is its likely side effect - the need to manage CAD files. Today, CAD files created by applications such as Autodesk's AutoCAD or Bentley Software's MicroStation are the domain of a relatively small world of highly skilled specialists. Sure, there may be hundreds of engineers and designers using CAD software at companies such as BMW or GE but most of us never touch a CAD file. Now, 3D printing may be changing that.

There is a new generation of CAD tools emerging that enable much easier creation and sharing of CAD drawings. New software such as Autodesk's 123D Catch enable regular users like you and me to create our own computer models of physical objects by simply 'scanning' them with an iPad. There are also new sites that facilitate the sharing and selling of such computer models. If we have a 3D printer on every desk ten years from now, all of us will be managing our CAD files the way we manage our music or video files in iTunes today.

This is exciting news for the enterprise content management (ECM) industry which included engineering content management solutions for many years. This type of software is really a niche subcategory of ECM today. However, that may be changing soon! CAD files tend to be very complex with many layers of data stacked upon the core structural model of a given object.

Just think of a car with its electrical system, fuel system, cooling system, heating and air conditioning, etc. Each of these systems represents multiple layers that all comprise a CAD drawing. All these layers need to be managed separately because they are worked on by different engineers and they need to be shared with suppliers and subcontractors. However, the entire project also has to be managed as a single entity to make sure all of the systems are delivered on time for the actual product release. All of this leads to a lot of complexity that can only be solved by an enterprise content management system.

Soon, all of us will need some type of a content management solution with the ability to manage CAD drawings natively. In the consumer space, that may be still relatively simple - just like iTunes does an acceptable job at managing my music connection (well, it does a rather poor job, really, but that's a different topic). In the enterprise, however, we will need an entirely different type of a solution with enterprise-grade requirements for versioning, security, collaboration, process management, compliance, etc. That is good news for the ECM vendors.

Besides the need to natively manage CAD files, I also expect the emergence of another type of software - security and intellectual property management. Digital CAD drawings and computer models are easy to share - and easy to steal. This will lead to a massive black market for original CAD plans of expensive physical products. Indeed, as the 3D printers become capable of reproducing complex, high quality objects, the day will come when it will be much easier to get the plans for a new Rolex and print it yourself rather than buying one.

To avoid going down the same path as the music industry, the CAD industry will need a lot of enterprise content management.

My Thoughts On PRISM

Front page of The Guardian on June 10

The British newspaper The Guardian published for the first time on June 7, 2013 information about a large-scale data surveillance program called PRISM. Based on the information obtained from the former CIA employee Edward Snowden, the US government has been collecting vast volumes of personal data from cloud based services provided by US companies that represent the who-is-who of the high-tech world: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Based on the recent news updates, it looks like other governments have been doing the same.

This is very worrisome.

I am not surprised that the government is collecting all this data. It is too easy and too tempting. With the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, it is probably even legal - at least based on the intelligence agencies’ interpretation of the law. Comparisons of how the government respects our paper mail while snooping our email are complete nonsense. The government respects the paper mail because it has no ability to snoop it. US Mail is a highly distributed system that handles data that is hard to duplicate - paper letters. Intercepting them all is practically impossible and copying them is difficult. Even if they did, they would end up with warehouses full of paper that would be highly impractical to search through.

Compared to that, collecting our electronic data is rather easy. The data is highly centralized and accessible through a few central choke points called Google, Facebook, etc. It is very easy to copy, and when stored, it is relatively easy to search through - just search for your name on Google and you get the idea of what the government has to do. Sure, storage and organization of all that data represents a challenge - a real “Big Data” challenge - but nothing that can’t be solved today.

As for privacy, let’s not kid ourselves. The government, the intelligence agencies, and the law enforcement don’t have much regard for our privacy. Have you flown on a plane in the last decade? They make you take off your shoes, your sweater, and your belt. They capture a picture of your naked body. They look through your luggage and make you bare your toiletries. They have an extensive data profile on you with all the info from your passport and often also your fingerprints and retina scan. They keep a record of all your flights and border crossings. If they like, they give you a thorough pat down. What makes you think that they would hesitate to search through your email - your data that you are not even keeping on your own premises?

Now, let’s consider the other side of this coin. So, the government has a copy of all our emails, Facebook posts, tweets, and then some. That’s billions and billions of data records. There is no way that human eyes could possibly review all these records. In fact, when a human review is  needed, it can become pretty daunting - I wrote about this type of big challenge in my article The Only Hope for Privacy? The point is that only computer algorithms are looking at your personal data and they will only raise a flag if your data pattern suggests a behavior of interest - terrorist related activities, tax evasion, drug trafficking, etc. You could argue that if you are engaged in any such activity, the feds should be looking at your data. Right?

Well, no. This is exactly the type of an orwellian surveillance state that knows too much about its citizens and it doesn’t take long to start flagging any behavior the state deems adverse. It takes a frighteningly small step from snooping your data to killing your freedom of speech. That leads to the state telling citizens what to do and how to behave which is called dictatorship. That’s not what the US Constitution is about. That’s not what freedom, liberty, and justice are about. This is not the ideal upon which the United States have been founded. We must not allow this to happen. That’s what Edward Snowden was thinking when he decided to blow the whistle.

Now let’s be clear, there are some concerning questions about Edward Snowden that should be answered. I don’t blame him that he went public with classified information. While that is against the rules (against the law), he obviously didn’t have the option of blowing the whistle the proper way - by informing to his supervisor, HR department or Chief Legal Counsel. Those are the guys behind the mass surveillance. But he did have the option to disclose the information anonymously and I wonder why he didn’t. I also wonder why he ended up hiding in China and Russia which are officially friendly nations but, honestly, I’d feel better if he was hiding in the United Arab Emirates or Indonesia which are also non-extradition countries. Going public in his own name and doing it in China rings a little alarm bell for me. But still, Edward Snowden appears to have done the honorable thing, albeit illegal.

So, where do we go from here? Well, this is a tough one. Our technology has created a monster by making all of our data readily available to snooping. We have also created a climate of public paranoia that places security above privacy. At least perceived security as there is no real evidence that all those security measures such as airport security controls or cameras on city streets yielded any tangible security increase for the citizens. The number of terrorists that the TSA caught in the last 10+ years is exactly zero while the annual TSA budget is $8 billion (source: BusinessWeek). Both of these things are a genie that won’t easily go back into the bottle.

In the end, I hope that we will educate ourselves enough to better understand how to handle our information to keep at least some of it private. Maybe, not all the data should end up in the Cloud after all! I also hope that the security vs privacy pendulum swings back and finds some point of equilibrium that will make our lives more pleasurable. The excessive security that has become part of our daily lives is the kind of asymmetric response that I wrote about two years ago. Because every time I get a thorough pat down at the airport, I can’t help thinking that the bad guys might have won when they set out to make our lives miserable.

What Features Ensure Compliance?

I hear the word ‘compliance’ tossed around all the time but I suspect that many of those using the word only have a very vague idea about what it means. Compliance usually refers to the adherence to the rules that have been imposed upon you by the law or some type of regulatory body. But what technical capabilities are required to actually comply with such legal and regulatory requirements?

First, let’s be clear. You don’t use the word compliance when you are referring to something that you really want to do. Compliance usually means an inconvenience that you are required to do. It rarely saves you time or money. However, compliance is designed to protect you from failure, from disruption, from poor quality, from wrong decisions, from danger, from injury, and - if you live in America you’ve probably guessed it - from lawsuits. Various parties may be interested in protecting you from all of those risks. It could be a consumer safety regulator (i.e. the FDA in the pharma industry), your government (federal, state, or local), or your employer. But how does that actually work?

First, compliance often means to assure that proper authorization is in place for important decision making. That starts with access control - making sure that the right people have access to pertinent information at the right time. That usually involves a dose of security - preventing any unauthorized actor from manipulating the information or the decisions.

The decisions themselves are often required to be documented in a non-repudiable way. This is where electronic signatures come in. Unlike digital signatures which deal with mimicking the paper-based ‘wet signature’ in a digital form, e-signatures are all about capturing who, when, what and why. Electronic signatures are simply a data object with name, date, and brief justification that become attached to a version of a document. When someone changes the document version, the e-signature is invalidated. “I didn’t sign off on this version of the medication packaging” is what e-signatures are all about in the pharma industry’s FDA’s CFR 21 Part 11 regulation.

Other compliance requirements, such as Six Sigma and the various ISO customer service quality standards, ask to ensure that certain mandatory process steps are completed before the process can advance to the next stage. This is where technologies such as workflow  and BPM come in - workflow for processes where all steps occur within a single system and BPM for processes that cross multiple systems.

At the end of any process, many regulations require that all the artifacts are stored as proof in case of a potential audit or lawsuit. That’s the role of archiving and of course also records management. Records management not only stores the required information for a prescribed period of time, it also classifies the records to assign them a retention policy that specifies how long the record is to be kept and what should happen with it when the retention expires. Records management also deals with requirements such as legal holds (pausing of any record shredding during a lawsuit) and secure records disposal to prevent forensic recovery.

Finally, many regulations require the ability to trace back any steps for the purposes of an audit or investigation of an incident. This is where auditing comes in with the ability to record a timestamp for every event in an audit trail and the ability to easily review and analyze the audit trail.

There are many other capabilities that may be part of a compliance solution. The specific regulations drive the requirements. Beyond access control, e-signatures, workflow/BPM, archiving, records management, and auditing, compliance requirements may include search, publishing, secure communication, collaboration, and many other capabilities. Records management has been receiving plenty of attention lately; so much that many equate compliance to records management. Yet there is much more to compliance than records  which is what I wanted to show in this post.

Is It Time for DC Power?

In the 1880s, the War of Currents was raging between the two main factions - direct current (DC) which was heavily promoted by none other than Thomas Edison and alternating current (AC) advocated by George Westinghouse. The DC system was developed first and worked well for lighting which was the primary use of electricity in its early days. The AC system, however, has proven to be more efficient for powering motors and for carrying energy across long distances. In the end, AC won and the rest is a history. Today, our electricity grid is AC based.

Thomas A. Edison

When I look around my house today, I see a number of motor-based appliances including the washer, dryer, refrigerator, heater, air conditioner, etc. Those appliances use AC and that is the more efficient source of power for them. Yet increasingly, more and more of my electrical devices use a power adapter because they run on DC power: computer, printer, iPhone, iPad, PC speakers, cordless phone, Apple TV, TV set, alarm clock, radio, not to mention the many devices that use batteries: camera, keyboard, mouse, flashlight, fire alarm, etc.

Using all the power adapters to generate DC power is a hassle because of the lack of standardization. We practically have a different adapter for each device which is hugely inconvenient. Traveling with a bag full of power supplies is a major pain as I have written about in my post Environment and the Power Charger. In addition, power supplies are only about 70-80% efficient which means that about a quarter of the energy we produce (and pay for) is wasted on the AC to DC conversion.

This situation is particularly absurd for the increasing number of households that use solar panels to augment their power supply, often making them entirely independent from the AC power grid. The power produced by the solar panels is DC power. All the solar systems today require expensive inverters to invert the DC current into AC current. These inverters are expensive, often representing a significant portion of the entire cost for the solar power system. They are also inefficient, with efficiencies ranging from 50-90% - this is where we lose up to 50% of the energy produced by the solar panels!

So we are inverting DC solar power into AC current to power the house while losing up to 50% of the energy. At the same time, our devices increasingly use the DC power which requires an adapter that loses another 25% of the energy. So we are losing a significant percentage of the energy that we pay for. That sounds pretty inefficient, doesn’t it?

LED light bulbs may be the trigger

The story becomes even more interesting with the advent of LED-based light-bulbs. Lighting represents about 20% of household’s energy consumption today and switching to the LED light bulbs offers great opportunity to save on the monthly energy bill while doing something good for the environment at the same time. The LED lights are still pricey but those prices will surely go down, just like they did for the fluorescent light bulbs a decade ago. The problem with the LED light bulbs is LEDs work on DC and so each LED bulb has to contain a power converter which converts the house AC into the DC that the LED lights need. More AC/DC craziness, not to offend any rock fans...

All of this begs the question - is it time to wire our houses for DC power? We have standardized DC power in our cars with a slew of gadgets and appliances using the "cigarette lighter outlets" - from phone chargers and GPS to air pumps and mini-refrigerators. Many airlines provide a DC outlet in every seat to power our laptops and other gadgets. Why not have such DC outlets in every room of the house? Why not have the lights wired on a DC circuit?

USB outlets exist today

Sure, we will still need to transport power across long distances and we’ll need an AC circuit to power the big appliances with motors. But most houses have a separate 220V circuit for big appliances in addition to the standardized 110V wiring. In Europe, most house have 220V (well, 240V really) and they also have a 380V circuit for their washer, dryer, water heater and other big appliances. Why not have a separate DC circuit for all the devices? AC would come to the house like it does today but one single converter would replace all of those individual power adapters. On top of that, DC power is easier to store and a couple of batteries could provide an effective backup power supply.

Re-standardizing something as essential as the power system is a major undertaking. But we live in the times of major undertakings. If Google can take pictures of every street in the world and Tesla can build a network of charging stations throughout the entire country and SpaceX can fly to space, we might be also capable of switching to a more efficient power circuitry. We even have a standard - USB - which may not be meeting all the needs, but could be a starting point. Of course, we would first have to convince Apple to add USB interface to all their devices...

PS: Thank you, Brett, for an inspiring dinner conversation!

Social Media Hype Cycle

One of my ten Content Management Predictions for 2013 was that Facebook will hit rocky grounds in 2013 and that its growth will stall. Sure enough, just a couple of weeks ago, it has been widely reported that Facebook has recently lost the number of unique monthly visitors in the US. According to Nielsen, the number of unique visitors to Facebook’s website in the US has declined by 11 million - from 153 million to 142 million between March 2012 and March 2013. Another analyst firm, SocialBakers, appears to be confirming the trend by observing a similar decline in the UK. In addition, Gartner just published a report called How B2B Marketers Use Social Now which states that B2B marketers are abandoning their attempts to use Facebook as a way to connect with their audiences.

I’m actually not a Facebook doomsayer. In fact, I am an avid user. These kinds of data points may very well just be a blip. A certain slowdown was inevitable, though, which is why I wrote my prediction. Facebook has been rising very, very quickly and the expectations were just too highly inflated. Some degree of disillusionment was inevitable.

Well, all of that reminded me of the Gartner Hype Cycle - one of the business tools I like a lot and that is perhaps a bit underutilized today. The Hype Cycle, explained in detail in the book Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskin, describes the key phases through which a technology can go:

Gartner’s Hype Cycle model

Connecting the recent Facebook data and my assessment of Facebook’s current situation with the Hype Cycle, I have mapped Facebook and other social networks onto the model. The Hype Cycle, though, has not been developed to examine specific products but rather technologies. To accommodate for that, I had to make a little modification, using the same poetic terminology that Gartner introduced. Because products do actually fail and disappear, I had to add another branch onto the chart. Come to think about it, technologies do fail too...perhaps Gartner should add my addition to their Hype Cycle model?

My modified Hype Cycle model

Now, we can map the actual social media products onto this chart:

The Social Media Hype Cycle

Obviously, it takes some time for us to figure out what some of the social networks are good for. Sometimes, they fall victim to hype that anticipates more practical use cases or greater adoption than are realistic. An example of that is Facebook and its use for B2B marketing. That can sometimes lead to disappointment and loss of a particular audience or all of the audiences. On the other hand, after some experiments, we often do figure out the practical use and the social media tool becomes useful.

Here are some of my explanations on the state of the various social media in the context of the Hype Cycle:

Facebook has reached its peak of inflated expectations and that’s the reason behind some of the negative reports. Clearly, the service is hugely popular but it appears to have reached the limits of its usefulness. New innovations such as the Social Graph are mostly useful to advertisers rather than to the users and it is the danger of excessive advertising that is Facebook’s greatest threat. It is not clear today, what kinds of activities we will be using Facebook for in the future and there are many fashion trends on Facebook that keep coming and  going - remember poking, gifting of virtual gifts, the Farmville craze, or the daily workout updates? Those have all come and gone. Perhaps that is the primary purpose of Facebook - to try things out on a massive scale and see what works in a highly connected, social environment. But before we have figured that out, there will be a decent dose of disillusionment along the way.

Google+ has reached a critical mass of users but its audience is still limited. Chances are your family relatives are on Facebook and they are not on Google+. While you can have a very vibrant, special interest community on Google+, you can’t use Google+ alone because a good portion of your family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances are not on it. At the same time, Google continues innovating with cool features such as the hangouts while they have the advertising bit figured out which is what most of Facebook’s innovation is being wasted on today.

LinkedIn is clearly ahead of everyone else in terms of reaching the plateau of productivity. This is a social network for business, with a clear purpose and an obvious use case - recruiting. While your grandma might not be on LinkedIn, everybody in your business world has a LinkedIn profile, even those who are not on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.

Twitter has established itself as a productive tool in the business of quickly learning about what’s going on. We are no longer tweeting about what’s for dinner but rather about what we believe should matter to our followers. Whether it’s the recent political rally, the stock market swings, the latest corporate merger, or tonight’s sports scores, Twitter is really good for all of that.

MySpace has evolved to a surprisingly resilient social network for the music scene and music fans. While MySpace clearly lost to Facebook the big war of general purpose social media, it may become a very viable special purpose social site. We’ll see which way it eventually goes.

Quora has yet to find its purpose. The ability to ask questions and receive answers from a large community of similar minded people is powerful, but the practical use cases are limited. Market research would be the obvious suggestion but the heavy self-selection bias limits the usefulness of this social network.

Foursquare is experiencing some disillusionment. While a few passionate users continue checking in and telling the world where they are - and in some cases that alone is somewhat interesting (yes, Mr. Steve Wozniak) - the practical benefits of that are rather limited. Basically, the only use case so far has been to better target advertising which is not what most people want more of. Foursquare is rapidly hitting the trough of disillusionment.

Pinterest is quickly climbing up the slope towards the peak of inflated expectations. We haven’t quite figured out what is it good for but it is cool and addictive. A classic formula for a hype! Inevitably, the trough of disillusionment will follow.

Ping is quickly following SecondLife through the ravine of demise into the valley of oblivion.

So there you have it. This is my way to analyze the state of Facebook and the entire social media market using the Gartner Hype Cycle model and some creative license. You may not agree with all my assessments but we will surely see a lot of fast-paced change in this space!

Scalability Redefined

Scalability matters. Obviously. But scalability seems to mean many things to different people. Most commonly, scalability is equated to the number of users - people - accessing a particular system. That's a good start, but we we have to of course consider the degree of concurrency. There is a difference between a solution that 1,000 people use once or twice a week versus a solution that 1,000 people pound upon continuously.

In large deployments, there is also the question of how many systems are actually really being used. Early in my career, I spent several years working at Novell. It was the heyday before Windows NT and the company enjoyed a commanding market share. Large and small companies used Novell networks. But we knew, that an average (software) server always had only about 100-200 users working on it. Sure, there were some companies with 100,000 employees that used Novell NetWare. Those were big deals, big deployments, and examples of high scalability. Right? Well, not really.

Those large companies were in reality running hundreds of separate Novell server instances and each one of them would still get just a couple hundred users. I see a similar pattern with today's deployments of Microsoft SharePoint and, to some extent, also with Exchange. It is quite a different kind of scalability when 100,000 users all share a single instance of an OpenText repository - even if that repository runs physically across multiple hardware servers.

There are more dimensions to scalability than just the number of users, though. The number of operations or transactions comes to mind - from MIPS to the number of credit card purchases. How about the number of objects under management? Examples could be the number of documents, number of customers, number of transactions, number of contracts, number of relationships, number of suppliers, etc.

To be scalable, enterprise software must not be just capable of holding the number of objects in a database or repository. It also has to provide the ability to efficiently view and manipulate the data. If your web-based user interface shows the objects in blocks of 20 while you have millions of objects to sort through, your application might not be very scalable! By the way, having a single data container capable of holding millions of objects is another dimension of scalability.

There is yet another factor that needs to be added to the definition of scalability: the metadata. This is the data that describes your data. Without metadata, your data only contains what is explicitly stated in it. Sometimes, that may be useful by itself but in most cases, we want to add lots of enterprise related context. We want to add information about people and teams who work with the data. Information about the organizational structure and approval hierarchies. Information about projects to which the data belongs. The deadlines, the cost centers, the retention requirements, etc. The metadata can be often richer (= bigger) than the data itself. But it is absolutely critical in the enterprise and your application needs to scale to accommodate it.

There are many factors that define scalability and looking just at the number of users can be often insufficient or even misleading.

The Social Groupthink

The groupthink is a well documented psychological phenomenon where a group of people, usually insulated from any counterbalancing point of view, ends up making gravely irrational decisions. During the phenomenon, the group is driven by the spirit of harmony, collaboration and the desire to reach consensus. The more the reasoning progresses, the more the group is mutually reinforcing its one-sided perspective while it completely discounts any alternate point of view. The results can be disastrous and many events in history have been attributed to the groupthink, including the US Navy negligence prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor or the US invasion of the Bay of Pigs.

The John F. Kennedy cabinet during the Cuban Missile Crises - another "groupthink" at work

In the world of social media, groupthink is very common. On social media, we tend to follow people who share views that are consistent with our own views. Hockey fans follow other hockey fans, single mothers follow single mothers, wine connoisseurs follow wine connoisseurs, and democrats follow democrats. This natural selection is the result of a rational behavior - we engage with people with whom we share common interests.

On top of that, social media like Facebook employ filtering algorithms to reduce the torrent of updates we get exposed to. These filters are based on explicit personal preferences (i.e. interests stated in our profiles) as well as on the results of our interactions. If you like a post about kittens the algorithm will reason that you like kittens and chances are you will be seeing more posts about kittens. Over time, you end up ‘liking’ various comments, pictures, and pages. Based on your liking, Facebook starts presenting you more of the stuff you like from the people who’ve shared liked news before. That happens at the cost of all other news in your newsfeed. As a result, you get exposed only to views from friends who you “like" more and more and you won’t get exposed to anything else. This is a fertile breeding ground for a groupthink with all its shortcomings.

Now, consider social software in the enterprise. Its promise was to stimulate employee effectiveness and foster innovation by bringing together diverse groups of employees who bring in different expertise and who share different points of view. Yet, if we end up with conversations where only the employees thinking the same way talk to each other, the results of social software will be greatly reduced.  

There are, of course, many other great uses for social software in the enterprise i.e. collective decision making, process collaboration, or customer service. Yet with the need to drive the corporate innovation agenda on top of the priority list for many CEOs, the promise to use social software for ideation is very compelling.

To make that happen, we must avoid the social groupthink. We have to be very careful about the filtering algorithms we employ and we have to devise strategies that encourage employees to engage with others beyond their existing teams and functions. Tribal interactions are good, but engaging across a variety of employees is what stimulates corporate innovation.

Gesture Control in the Enterprise and the Consumerization Chasm

When Microsoft first shipped Kinect as an add-on for the XBox 360, I thought: “Wow, there is a new way to interact with information!” Sure, Kinect was designed for ‘full body gaming’ as Microsoft calls it but the ability to use gestures to find, access and view information seemed very promising. Ever since the 2002 hit movie Minority Report, we are yearning to work with information the way the Tom Cruise character did: using gestures.

The original - Steven Spielberg's Minority Report 

The use cases in the consumer space are primarily focused on gaming and the interaction with entertainment media. Using iTunes on AppleTV or Netflix on Xbox is great but, let’s face it, searching for movies using a remote control with no keyboard is a pain. Gestures could help with browsing the content while voice recognition could solve the typing problem.

Microsoft Kinect

The use cases in the enterprise, though, are far more promising. Just think about the surgeon with sterile hands who needs to flip through a series of X-rays, zoom in, start and pause a video recording from a echocardiograph, and quickly query a drug database. Think about the aircraft mechanic with oily hands who needs to access a repair manual for the latest model of a jet engine. How about the teachers explaining the latest material in front of a class of students? Or the speaker on stage using his hands instead of a geeky laser pointer...or instead of a fork lift like Al Gore did in The Inconvenient Truth? There are many possible professional uses for the gesture technology!

Yet, how come I don’t see any of this in the real life? Maybe Kinect isn’t good enough? Maybe it is sold only through the same stores that sell the gaming consoles and ignore the enterprise? Does Microsoft Marketing perhaps need help? There is a Kinect for the Windows web site promoting a software development kit (SDK) but there are no business examples featured on that site.

Google Glass, those hip looking glasses with a built-in computer screen (and a computer) have a similar potential in the enterprise. There are many professions that would greatly benefit from this kind of “always on display”. However, Google’s primary concern right now is making sure that a lot of celebrities get their picture taken with the Glass on their nose. They don’t even talk about business use cases. I worry now that Google will spend all its energy on devising schemes on how to push ads to people while they walk down the mall. Sure, we have seen that too in Minority Report but, honestly, that part of the movie sucked.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass

Microsoft Kinect, Google Glass, and other interactive devices such as the MYO wrist device or the Leap Motion Controller, combined with the Siri-like voice recognition are the future of computing. Touchscreen has its limitations. People have only so much tolerance for the small screen size of a smartphone - which is why the so-called phablets have become so popular. The interaction with a computer of the future will likely not involve fingers on glass but rather gestures, voice and perhaps even thoughts.

MYO is a gesture control armband

While using such interactive devices to browse movies is cool, using them in the enterprise can result in some really powerful benefits. Unfortunately, the leading vendors such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all chasing the consumers right now. Consumerization is hitting the enterprise but the vendors only think about the consumers and not about the enterprise. The innovation in enterprise computing is stagnating today and there is a chasm. And where there is a chasm, new opportunities open up for new entrants...