Okay, I don’t have an iPhone and I don’t use Lotus Connections, but I think this demo of Lotus Connections on the iPhone is really cool:
Here’s why this is neat: Focusing on interfacing with Lotus Connections via a portable device such as the iPhone has necessarily resulted in a significant decluttering and simplification of the Lotus Connections interface. We see in the demo nothing but the basic elements of enterprise expertise management — access to individuals and groups and the ability to locate and obtain access to needed expertise.
These functions incorporate the essence of expertise management that I wrote about here and here back in 2006. Now, though, the tools and functionality have become more accessible, more streamlined, more user friendly, and much more mobile. Hopefully all smartphone interfaces will be able to access such apps in the future.
We still face challenges in some quarters to acceptance of “enterprise 2.0” solutions such as this, and expertise management systems and knowledge access networks still don’t build themselves — yet. But pushing sophisticated functionality like we see in the demo to a usable, friendly, hand-held device is a major step forward in making sophisticated collaboration and expertise sharing tools available anywhere.
Text copyright (c) 2010 by Dennis D. McDonald.
Luis Suarez references this post in Finding Experts in Your Company … While You Are on the Road! In a nutshell he emphasizes the significance of having an expertise access system available on a portable device:
He is actually referring to this demo shared in YouTube that shows IBMs Lotus Connections on an Apple iPhone (Wish it would contain sound as well; it would be have so much more effective! Oh well…), where the main focus is eventually on keeping things as simple as possible: i.e. finding the experts at your fingerprints with as few steps as you possibly can, without much clutter, so you can connect with them right away to help you answer those questions that came up while you are on the road and without access to your computer or a reliable network.