DECEMBER 2014 \ BUILDING DIALOGUE \
35
Moving Forward
3 Personal Cloud Apps
The BYOD – bring your own device – has now extended
past hardware. Our survey uncovered that employers are on
average providing only one “app” on mobile devices, leaving
employees to install their personal preference of 5 or more
useful apps to be more productive.
And there’s no use fighting it. If there was ever a time to
take stock of the personal apps your teams are using in the
workplace, it’s now. By implementing enterprise-class ac-
counts on the cloud services your workers are already us-
ing, you can take better advantage of these apps’ advanced
features while mitigating the risks associated with hosting
your business data on accounts outside your IT department’s
control.
4 The Second Screen
Everywhere we go, smartphones and tablets are supple-
menting the work experience as we divide our attention
between the software on our laptops and the apps on our
mobile devices. Increasingly, workers are adding tablet stands
to their workstations to enhance the multidevice experience,
and this will become commonplace in the coming year.
Research has shown an increase in productivity related to
adopting a second screen, particularly as users leverage one
for email and the other for work.
5 “Timeshifting” and Asynchronous Workflow
There’s nothing especially new about globalization itself,
but the advent of cloud collaboration tools is profoundly
changing the way we think about teamwork, time zones and
international boundaries. There are distinct advantages to
having a team that’s distributed around the world. The prin-
cipal advantage of the global team is timeshifting – the abil-
ity to distribute workflow across time zones to keep a project
progressing around the clock, accomplishing in a day or two
what might take a week for a team working together from
one office.
6 Personal Teleconferencing
While some large enterprises have invested heavily in the
telepresence technologies, it never really went mainstream
in a big way, mainly because of its expense and technical
complexity. Personal teleconferencing is proving to be the
polar opposite. Now, it’s commonplace to see coworkers jump
on a Google Hangout, Face Time or Skype session to conduct
a quick meeting from the high-quality cameras already built
into their multiple devices.
“Survey Finding: Only 14% of frequent videoconference
users cited utilizing robust telepresence technologies, as the
majority are using more convenient accessible options, like
Face Time, GoTo Meeting and Microsoft Lync.”
7 Tablet Whiteboards
Much like telepresence systems, a wave of big, pricey dig-
ital whiteboards swept into the workplace a few years ago,
and better, cheaper alternatives are now popping up in a
far more accessible form. Tablet-based whiteboard apps like
Groupboard let you quickly kick off a whiteboard collabo-
ration with a group, either remotely or in-person, wherever
you are, bringing a newfound agility to the whiteboard ex-
perience. The number of fixed, wall-applied whiteboards is
declining, as mobile marker boards create a more agile and
adaptable work environment that writable walls can’t match.
8 Event-Driven Automation
The concept of event-driven automation began gaining
traction with simple features like Google Alerts, which simply
notifies youwhen a new entrymatching a specific search term
appears on theWeb. A site called IFTTT (for “If This, Then That”)
now has enabled more sophisticated automation through
connected web apps that trigger tasks, like monitor your Gmail
inbox and automatically add incoming photo attachments to
a Flickr account, or track business mileage in a Google spread-
sheet just by texting your latest mileage to a given number.
9 Dynamic Mobile Presentations
Fumbling with power cords and long procession of static
slides is a sure way to lose the interest of your audience. Active
presentation tools like Prezi, GoAnimate and Sliderocket are
making content interesting again with cool animations and
unique approaches to the flow of information. Get right to the
point by simply AirPlay-ing your iPad screen to showcase your
work anywhere with SlideShark.
10 Internet of Everything
Known as the Internet of Everything, the coming wave of
connected objects is already beginning to emerge as smart
chips and wireless Internet connections are popping up in ev-
erything from smoke detectors to toothbrushes. Moving for-
ward, the workplace adoption will mean a massive rethinking
of IT resources as every object in the office – from the vending
machine in the break room to the paper towel dispensers in
the lavatory – gets an Internet address of its own. You’ll need to
beef up your network bandwidth, but in exchange you’ll gain
insights never before possible, such as the ability to correlate
data points between the temperature and humidity of the of-
fice and employee productivity.
For the full white paper, visit
“Game Changers: 2014 10 Tech Trends that are Redefining the
Business World”
About the survey author:
Robert Strohmeyer is a veteran business
and technology journalist whose work has appeared in Wired,
PCWorld, Macworld, Entrepreneur, Executive Travel, Smart
Business and numerous other publications. He tweets as @
caretpi.
\\
Virtual communication + technology = newways in which we
collaborate, communicate and compute.
