Outlook Point of View July 2008, No. 2 By Larry Socher, Shahid Ahmed and Vaibhav J. Parmar To read offline:
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PDF Help Larry Socher is a senior executive with Accenture and the global lead for the company's Network Operating Group in Communications & High Tech. Shahid Ahmed is a senior executive with Accenture focused on the wireless industry within the company's Global Infrastructure Consulting group. Vaibhav Parmar is a senior manager and the enterprise wireless offering lead in Accenture's Wireless Technology Consulting group. Mobile widgets—compact software applications that push Internet content and functionality to a mobile device—represent a significant market potential for service and content providers. Widgets can help increase data traffic and enable a more efficient use of network resources without additional outlay of capital expenditures. They also give distributors the ability to bundle applications more efficiently while helping end-users further customize their content experience. Widgets are already a major force in the world of consumer Internet-based applications for the desktop and mobile phone. But Accenture believes that enterprise-focused mobile widgets have the greatest potential to support high performance by supplying industrial-grade, scalable functions and capabilities that can help organizations and their people perform at higher levels. Rise of the Widget
Want to share digital photos with your family in a way that even Grandma can understand? Easily create a layout for your personal webpage? Get the current weather forecast pushed to your mobile phone? Have a personal digital assistant monitor houses for sale in your area according to your preferences? There's a widget for all those needs and, potentially, hundreds of thousands more. The importance of these mini-applications can best be seen by looking at two different ways to interact with the Internet world. Compare two ways of getting stock information. In one approach, you go to a financial services website, look up the stock abbreviation for a company you want to track, enter that abbreviation in a search field, wait for the information and then probably click through several levels of data before finding exactly what you need. Now compare that to a second approach: you sign up for a widget that is preprogrammed with the stocks you want to monitor and the level or type of information you're looking for. The widget then pushes only those stock quotes to you, when you want them, where and how you want them. No wasted effort, no wasted time, no irrelevant data to wade through. If you're a services company and can provide widgets like that to your customers—innovative pieces of functionality that serve people's most important needs—you have a reason for customers to seek you out and then stick around for a while. If you're a content provider or a communications company not currently in the wireless business—a cable firm, for example—widgets can be a delivery channel to send your content to the end-user's mobile device without getting completely into the wireless game, with your own network or your own piece of the device ecosystem. Mobile Widgets for Consumers and Enterprises
Widgets established themselves first in a desktop environment. Yahoo, for example, offers more than 4,000 widgets in its online gallery, and Google has almost 10,000. Widgets are now reshaping the world of mobile services too. For example, WidSets—a mobile widget service provided by Nokia—already offers more than 4,000 applications in 56 languages for more than 300 phone models. The growing pervasiveness of mobile widgets is easily understood. While widgets are a convenience in the online world, they can be looked at as near-essential in the mobile world. The reason: the mobile device is small and the interface is often challenging. Wading through large amounts of information in a mobile environment isn't just a nuisance; it's a near impossibility. If you're at the airport wondering whether your spouse's plane is on time, you don't want to waste time punching little keys on your mobile device so that you can navigate to the airline's website and then look up the information. Instead, you want the airline, and your service provider, to send you alerts about the estimated arrival time of your spouse's flight. Currently, consumer-oriented widgets are getting most of the attention, but one of the big opportunities for widget innovation today is at the enterprise level. For the most part, enterprise mobility is currently limited to basic functions such as e-mail. There are few composite, mobile-enabled applications that have enterprise-level impact. Based on recent advances in smart phone and wireless data technologies, however, Accenture believes that enterprise mobile widgets are an important part of the future. Imagine a sales team for a utility company focused on large accounts, such as multi-tenant housing with a mix of retail, corporate and personal units. The account person for a particular building might be very interested in finding out account statistics for a specific client—what consumption was, what the client spent in recent months, and so forth. Enterprise widget functionality could push consolidated reports to this sales team out in the field—reports about these clients and their utility usage based on corporate ERP data as well as CRM systems. Such information could help the team serve their clients more effectively. Challenges to Effective Design and Delivery of Mobile Widgets
Mobile widgets are a significant business opportunity for service providers today, yet a host of challenges and complexities need to be addressed to really drive business value from widgets. Developing the business case
Developers are finding that in spite of general support for widget development, senior management is looking for a strong quantitative and qualitative analysis of the potential benefits. Such metrics are certainly possible, especially given the productivity improvements available to a sales force or field staff using an enterprise mobile widget that can tailor and deliver meaningful information about customers and their needs. Supporting complex systems integration
In the enterprise mobile widget example discussed above, a highly complex integration of back-end systems is required to deliver only the meaningful bit of data via the widget to the sales force. That means taking information in its raw form, in whatever format or database it is stored in, and transforming it ("mashing it up" as the saying goes) so that it can be displayed on a mobile device in a compelling way. Coping with multiple operating systems
One of the biggest challenges of widget development is writing multiple sets of computer code so that a widget will be compatible with multiple operating systems and types of devices. Evaluation and deployment
Based on Accenture's experience, companies considering new mobile widgets should evaluate and then deploy applications according to four criteria: the business model, distribution model, server-side application framework and the run-time environment. Key questions to consider within each area include: - Business model: How are the developers compensated? How is the carrier compensated? How are the data providers compensated?
- Distribution/deployment model: How are new widgets deployed to the user's phone? How easy is it for an end user to use and update a widget? How are mobile widgets promoted?
- Server-side application framework: What support is provided for developing the server-side applications? How is security/authentication accomplished?
- Run-time environment: What capabilities does the widget home base support? What application programming interfaces are available to the mobile widget developer? Are there compatible standards?
Conclusion: Driving Toward High Performance with Mobile Widgets
Mobile widgets can potentially deliver big benefits to companies. Carriers, for example, can see increased data traffic from widgets, as well as more efficient use of network resources without additional outlay of capital expenditures. Distributors can bundle applications more efficiently with widgets, and the compact code design allows easier transfer. From the end-user perspective, mobile widgets enable customization of data and creation of applications that are easier to use and that present a richer content experience. Information can be delivered faster and made more relevant, which can boost productivity. In short, mobile widgets represent a significant market potential because of the pervasive nature of widget applicability and compatibility. While consumer-based mobile widgets more often capture the industry's attention, enterprise-focused mobile widgets have the greatest potential to support high performance by supplying industrial-grade, scalable functions and capabilities that can help organizations and their people perform at higher levels. To Top |