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User-Centric Working: the PC is Dead and Personal Computing Thrives

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face="Verdana, sans-serif"> style="font-style: normal;">Andy

Mulholland, CTO, Capgemini
face="Verdana, sans-serif">

face="Verdana, sans-serif">I

wrote this post in anticipation of the 30th birthday of

the PC in August with the accompaniment of various articles and posts

about this pretty momentous occasion. Momentous because the

'personal' element was the beginning of a really genuine shift in

the way we work, leading to the 'consumerization of IT' as we

term much of today's changes. That is a path that has led us from

expensive hardware limiting its use to enterprises, large expensive

projects, extremely structured processes, and proprietary licensed

software to, well what?

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face="Verdana, sans-serif">Little

did I know that a day after I had written it the news would be full

of HP announcing that they were spinning off their PC business as it

was no longer a key technology in their hardware manufacturing

business. I hurriedly wrote a new post for last week questioning

whether ' href="http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2011/08/wheels-pc-industry/">the

wheels

had come off the PC business' and dwelling on HP's

shift in positioning and strategy. Frankly, the rest of this piece

comes up pretty well aligned to these changes last week so from here

on it's the original piece starting with the answer to the question

as to what and where the path from the PC is or has led us...

face="Verdana, sans-serif">The

answer is a relatively large range of low cost technology devices

that increasingly all interact through a wireless connection with the

Internet to reach a range of content and services that redefines

personalization, and indeed the phrase 'service' itself. Though

it's not part of this blog, consider for a moment the ubiquitous

GPS in cars; the latest TomTom units are remarkable not just for what

they can do in terms of real-time information on anything from

traffic to parking, but for what they cost, and the opportunity they

give businesses and users to 'do business together' in new ways

around location, timing and events. The owner/user receives a new

level of capabilities and personalization that changes their view of

'travel'.

face="Verdana, sans-serif">It's

the same with the user's view of work; as I have said in previous

posts, work is an activity today and a place. We work in real-time

interactions with people, events and locations, and just like the GPS

we have increasingly powerful tools on hand to do so. So what and how

has the executive power user redefined 'personal computing'

already and how will a steadily increasing number of power users

expect to be supported over the coming years?

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face="Verdana, sans-serif">It's

not just a simple adoption of tablets, nor even a battle between

smartphones, tablets and PCs (and it's certainly not only about

access to enterprise IT applications either). Today's power users

will have all three devices, with personal ownership mixed with

enterprise ownership, and are increasingly likely to have more than

one of each as well, i.e. a home PC as well as a work PC. I have a

lot of colleagues who fit this definition today and use all of their

devices at different times and want effective synchronization in

relative real-time between all of them. href="http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/08/ibm-leads-the-way-in-the-post-pc-era.html">The

term

user-centric computing is coming into use to define the

resulting environment.

face="Verdana, sans-serif">When

I travel a smartphone will be conveniently hooked to my belt allowing

me to do simple things in a timely way e.g. keep an eye on messages

and email, see a map and travel itinerary, etc. In the office during

the working day I need more, in particular I need to refer to

documents in meetings, make notes, look up information, find optional

answers to events as circumstances occur and, of course, the tablet

with its form factor, capability and long wireless life is ideal.

Back at my desk for some parts of the day then it's the PC for the

heavy duty personal creative work, such as writing this blog, or

checking the spreadsheet on the budget and amending, but most of all

this is where enterprise applications are used as these represent the

structured part of the working day.

face="Verdana, sans-serif">At

home it may be back to the PC for some evening or weekend catching up

on core activities but whereas the desktop or notebook enterprise PC

is likely to be Windows, the chances are that power users are on

Apple for their personal machines, or even a Linux variant. Maybe

that doesn't matter too much if the only enterprise service is

email and a calendar, and the same goes for their personal tablet and

smartphone, or does it? Actually it does because the pattern of work

is changing and the power users are heavy users of Web 1.0-based

content, Web 2.0-based people-to-people social tools and now

cloud-based process services, as much or more than enterprise

applications. I have a printed copy of a study from three years ago

that shows that for nine common business roles only 7% of their work

on average is on transactional enterprise applications. Put another

way, a huge part of a power user's personal value is around

real-time decision making, events, collaboration, etc. to solve

problems and optimize opportunities and most, if not all, of that is

going to happen off the enterprise desktop PC.

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face="Verdana, sans-serif">More

importantly that key point about device/work synchronization is going

to happen around the user and their devices externally using browser

cloud technology, and not internally around the data model of

enterprise applications using client-server technology. An Apple user

achieves the synchronization today seamlessly and automatically with

Apple iCloud, (could this be why Apple doesn't seem concerned about

enterprise sales as their technology is user-centric and not

enterprise-centric? Then there was the newly launched HP webOS that

aimed to provide the same common experience for HP PCs,

tablets and smartphones, or what about the Google model using Android

and Chrome to power a huge range of devices, or soon the Microsoft

option of Windows 8?

face="Verdana, sans-serif">All

the companies have user-centric retail operations and are pushing to

make their products as attractive as possible to the user as the

potential buyer, and adding features to support their way of using

the products, though Microsoft and HP have a clear corporate side to

their offerings too. Against this background could you make an

enterprise choice and manage clearly through it? You could but it

looks unlikely that you could make it stick for more than one or two

of the devices a user has, and even then you can't mandate how they

are used in the same ways as internal desktops. It's time to do

some serious planning about shifting from a desktop strategy and

refresh cycle, to a user's strategy and policy approach. With the

Apple iPad outselling all other tablets combined by a factor of eight

to one and HP unable to make any impact on this market it seems that

the users have already chosen their devices, and it wasn't with any

corporate management capabilities in mind!

face="Verdana, sans-serif">Oh

and the headline? No doubt you saw the many reports on the interview

with Dr Mark Dean, one of the original creators of the first fully

functional PC, the IBM 5150, in which he described the PC's days as

being numbered. Actually, if you read the whole of his href="http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/08/ibm-leads-the-way-in-the-post-pc-era.html">blog

and not just the instant headlines then the important comment is as

follows, and for me it offers a strong definition of 'user-centric'

computing:

face="Verdana, sans-serif">PCs

are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of

device — though there's plenty of excitement about smartphones

and tablets — but by new ideas about the role that computing can

play in progress. These days, it's becoming clear that innovation

flourishes best not on devices but in the spaces between them, where

people and ideas meet, and interact.



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