* When will we get the connected business?
Bill Gates traditionally provides the keynote address at the start of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas. This year he talked about the “connected lifestyle,” a favorite topic for the last decade. Bill wants alarm clocks to give weather reports, and LCD screens on refrigerators to report traffic jams.
What. A. Nightmare.
Keep your connected life, Bill; I see enough advertising already and don’t want to pay for TV shows for my Xbox 360 or cell phone. I want a truly connected business. I want to avoid surprises and know where people and resources are at all times.
Instead of a weather report from my alarm clock, how about a financial report based on what deposits and payments my bank has cleared during night? I’d rather know about receivables than rain showers.
Speaking of Accounts Receivable, tell the refrigerator to skip the auto traffic details and tell me if my payments are caught in a paperwork jam in my customer’s accounting process. I’d rather be late to the office than have checks come late.
If you manage or collaborate with other workers, how do you know where they are and when they’re ready to work? I can see show times for local movie theaters, but when will my coworkers show up? Why not have the time clock track who has checked in and make that report available? Better yet, tell me who hasn’t checked in. Managers can leverage “presence,” or the information available to Instant Messaging systems and smart Internet Protocol telephones to verify if workers, even those who work from home, are actually working.
And if Instant Messaging can report back such presence, why can’t e-mail servers tell us when someone last read e-mails? Novell’s GroupWise tells when messages are actually opened, but other popular small business e-mail systems don’t. For many employees, tracking e-mail use would be as reliable as a time clock.
As reported here, managers spend hours per week looking for information (mostly forgotten in somebody’s e-mail box). But businesses need to track more than just information. Where are the company cars? Where are the mobile workers? Where is the inventory?
Before your auto insurance rate goes up again, you may want to know if company vehicles are breaking speed limits. There are services to track teenage drivers as shown on Youth Driving Safe.org, so how about delivery drivers? Would you pay $500 for a box and service to track the location and speed of a company vehicle? How much would you pay to avoid a wreck caused by an employee speeding? How much would you pay to know about the speeding employee so you can fire him before he has a wreck?
Cell phones with GPS makes sense far beyond allowing mobile workers to avoid buying a map. Why can’t managers see where employees are on a tracking screen? If courier No. 2 is supposed to be driving north to a customer, why does her phone say it’s down south, not moving? I want to know before the customer from the north calls and complains, or worse, cancels. That’s the type of connected information businesses need.
UPS and FedEx created marvelous package tracking Web sites. Put in the unique tracking number and two seconds later the exact details of the package’s route appear, whether across town or across a continent. So why does this all break down once the box hits the loading dock in almost every small business? Materials and inventory tracking equipment, while available, remains expensive and complicated. Small businesses often know more about inventory being drop shipped after an eBay sale than they know about their own products.
The standard for shared calendars, decided years ago, has yet to make an impact. Third party services such as HyperOffice.com and Google Calendars make it easy to coordinate private and public calendars, but they don’t integrate with Microsoft Outlook and Blackberries and Smart Phones. Why not? Because device synchronization between two devices, much less a business full, remains dicey at best.
If you have answers to some of these questions, please share. If the network really is everywhere, let’s put it to work.
So, Bill, if you want to get businesses excited, stop talking about chatty alarm clocks and start talking about a truly connected business. Leave the refrigerator alone to keep food cold, but tell me which part of my business is hot. Make business network connections, not alarm clocks, more extensive and informative.
