|
Written by Brian Browne
|
| We keep looking for the ‘killer application’ or the ‘game changer’ in terms of technology support to business. Very often the game changer arises in front of us before we really know it. Very often, the game changer is not recognised until the game has changed. This is the case because a game changing piece of technology is invariably a fluke, it is a technology solution that just happens to find a problem that people didn’t really know they had. |
 |
A classic example of this is the simple text message. A piece of technology that was offered as an afterthought by the mobile technology companies. Not hugely popular in many countries, for good reason, it is really a very limited technology. Who could have predicted the huge uptake, particularly in the UK and primarily by teenagers, as a means of rapid, simple communication. No mobile telco started the SMS revolution by sitting down and asking what the business requirements were for a simple messaging system. Instead, what happened was that this technology existed as a byproduct of the network being available and teenagers had a problem that this capability accidentally solved.
 |
Another good example of solution by accident is Twitter. You can bet that no significant commercial organisation sat down and defined a set of requirements for a problem for Twitter to solve. Indeed, if they had done, in most organisations they would have been laughed out the door. You can just imagine the meeting, “I think there is a need for a website where people can provide any old nosy parker updates on their daily life. But - and here’s the killer guys - let’s limit them to 150 characters - oh and let’s call it a tweet”. |
|
The iPhone was a ‘fluke’, it was Apple’s typical innovation led product introduction. Before the iPhone there had been the Blackberry. That made perfect logical business sense - email on the move. Then there was the iPhone. It solved no real problem that people wanted from their telephone that the Blackberry didn’t solve. The iPhone didn’t make such easy sense and people were sceptical. Limited web access had been tried before and had not been successful. WAP technology, which was seen as meeting far more requirements than SMS by telcos, was also a bit of a flop. Worse still, who on earth would be able to use a touch screen for navigation and typing?
Instead, the iPhone’s genius was to provide a framework for thousands of developers and software companies to make solutions to problems that people didn’t know they had. Most were completely useless but one in a hundred somehow hit a spot. For me, the problem was Shazam. I never dreamt that it would be useful to have a phone that told me what music was being played just by being exposed to a snatch of it. It never occurred to me that it would be useful to have a phone that could then download and repeatedly play such music. Come to that, nobody ever asked for a phone that could play music, tell you where you are, play films and tell you how excitedly it is being shaken.
|
 |
 |
The iPad has the potential to be the iPhone and then some. At the moment people are thinking of solutions reaching millions of people on the iPhone. With the iPad we should be thinking of solutions reaching billions. What those solutions are I have no idea. What I do know is that the capability of the iPad is such that others more lucky or more clever than me will stumble across solutions that will become ubiquitous. The features of the iPad are just too strong for it to be otherwise. The display that is of usable size, the development framework that enables any solution to be built along with the inbuilt potential of the device itself.
In business you can see it already happening. Take the Lloyd’s insurance market. It has been nigh on impossible to introduce technology support into the front end sales negotiation between Insurance Brokers and the providers of cover, the Underwriters. A host of initiatives offering electronic support to this process, to streamline and introduce efficiency, have failed to take off. Yet the iPad is being trialled - and the difference is that the brokers actually want to get their hands on it. They want to use it to support their business. For the first time for them technology is a bit cool. |
Early on in my career I was told by an Insurance Underwriter that my role as an IT provider was to fill the ink wells and sharpen the pencils and to keep my nose out of business affairs. I suspect that if I walked round Leadenhall Street now with a stack of iPads to give away, they wouldn’t tell me to go and fill the ink wells. They might tell me to throw those ink wells away.
The iPad may become a leisure device. It may become a business device. It may become both. No-one really knows. One thing I do know, is that it is coming to your home sooner than you think.
To talk to us about introducing the benefits of innovation into your organisation contact
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
Our Insights 
