KM on the road: mobile applications

"A big driver for adoption by mobile workers is that they have a lot of downtime during travel," says Rado Kotorov, technical director of strategic product management at IBI. "We looked at what the BlackBerry had done for e-mail and realized we wanted to have a long-term strategy that leveraged the Internet, rather than a client side solution, which would require additional hardware to achieve mobile capability, plus separate software for each device."

Most of the demand in mobile BI is for scorecard information, according to Kotorov. "Tech-savvy CEOs in the retail space have requested daily and weekly sales on scorecard devices," he says. "Most customers do not need large databases, but we do have on-demand paging through large data sets, one page at a time."

Also, reports can be sent as attachments so they can be available locally. For example, NASA (nasa.gov) Kennedy Space Center, which was already using IBI’s software for requirements associated with the space shuttle, is using WebFOCUS Active reports and WebFOCUS Mobile Favorites to provide information to engineers when they are disconnected from the network.

MicroStrategy Mobile delivers its BI reports to BlackBerries. Users can access the same reports on the mobile device that they would from their desktops. MicroStrategy Mobile has the same security infrastructure available on the MicroStrategy platform and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Users can control the report presentation format and can also access them offline.

The Cognos 8 Go Mobile solution now supports Windows Mobile 6 and the Nokia eSeries and nSeries smartphones on the Symbian operating system, in addition to the BlackBerry, which has been supported since late 2006. The mobile product delivers information through the Cognos application interface, tailored for mobile delivery. Users can interact with live Cognos content, drilling down into numbers shown in the reports.

Suite mobility

One of the advantages SaaS applications have for mobile workers is that they eliminate the need to synchronize data acquired on a mobile device with data on the desktop. The user always works with the same set of data. Zoho, a division of AdventNet, provides more than a dozen SaaS applications in its online productivity suite. Several have been mobile-enabled, including Zoho Writer (a word processor), Zoho Sheet (a spreadsheet), and Zoho Creator (a database), with Zoho CRM and other business applications to follow soon. The mobile applications support Internet Explorer (IE), Opera, Safari and WAP browsers, and also run on the iPhone from Apple.

When users work with Creator, they can define, in just a few steps, a database that is accessible by phone.

"I often need to take notes on technical topics and sort them by some criterion such as project topic or deadline date," says Todd Ogasawara, who writes a blog on mobile technology and also works for the state of Hawaii. "I started using Zoho Creator recently and it was a revelation to see what I could do."

When Ogasawara wants to store a reminder about a technology to evaluate or a Web site to review, he can enter the date, reminder and other information in a fielded database that is automatically saved on his Zoho application site. Back in his office, he can see the database and follow up on items, sort by date or import a field into an existing Excel application.

Although Zoho was initially aimed at small to midsize companies, large companies are expressing considerable interest. "We have had some large retail chains where 20 users at a time are looking at a spreadsheet," says Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho. "When a user makes a change, everyone sees the change at the same time." The application can be set for particular users to have write capability or just read capability.

Other areas associated with knowledge management, such as expert systems and enterprise content management software, are also deploying mobile versions. As mobile devices and the browsers they use become more capable, delivery of KM solutions to those platforms will become more prevalent.

Search on the move

Search has been a mainstay of KM because of its vital role in information retrieval, and it’s now becoming a part of the mobile world. Vivisimo is offering Velocity for Mobile to search e-mail, intranet content, CRM and other content accessed through mobile devices. Velocity for Mobile categorizes the results, supplies brief titles and presents excerpts to provide context for the hits. The search engine brings in data from each repository and converts it to a format such as XML or HTML that mobile devices can read.

"While the search platform does not provide the functionality for any of the applications it is accessing," says Jerome Pesenti, chief scientist and co-founder of Vivisimo, "it does give the user the advantage of a unified interface through which to view all the target information, whether customer contacts, notes or e-mails."

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), which Microsoft plans to acquire) offers the full functionality of its desktop search in its Mobile Search Platform (MSP), including dynamic navigation and real-time alerting. In December 2007, FAST introduced FAST Active Mobile with Personalization and Recommendations to better utilize Web 2.0 content. The new software analyzes user behavior and then creates recommendations based on product relationships or consumer opinions. FAST supports the mCore Platform from InfoSpace, a service that provides yellow and white page directories, maps, Web searches and other resources available on mobile platforms and desktops. Mobile carriers in numerous countries, including Japan, Russia and Brazil, are using the FAST Active Mobile product suite.