The Internet of Things isn’t coming; it’s already here. The business challenge isn’t how to implement the technology, but rather how to make it more useful.
We already take advantage of the IoT through our cell phones and the sensors they contain, such as GPS and Bluetooth. The next wave of IoT is when we will start making our environment smarter. But to understand how that will happen, you need to really understand what IoT is.
Many people think that IoT is devices such as beacons talking to each other. But those devices are not talking to each other. They are just saying, “I am Jeremy’s office.”
Or they are saying, “I am Jeremy’s car” or “I am Wells Fargo Bank on Powell Street in San Francisco, California.”
Let’s put that scenario into an enterprise situation. One beacon might transmit: “I am a meeting table in Jeremy’s office.” Inherent in that statement is where Jeremy’s office is located—floor, building, city, state, country.
Combine that with a beacon that says, “I am my office,” meaning the beacon can transmit that Jeremy is in his office at the table. Then someone comes in, and another device says, “I am Kathy.” Those devices are pushing information into the cloud that can be pulled back. These devices aren’t saying anything about people, just announcing their presence. The combination of identity and location that you pull from these devices provides actionable context.
We can use that context to improve the user experience in enterprise applications. There’s a whole business process here to do with the people and their location that can be used to send particular information to them.
So What Has Changed?
In other words, IoT has been here since phones became smartphones, and we’ve always had secure Wi-Fi routers—and that’s all you need. When you walk into a hotel, a company’s headquarters, or any location, your smartphone picks up the nearest Wi-Fi router and various bits of information are pulled to your device about that location.
Because we have this infrastructure in place, we already have the ability to gather information about a particular user. Just going within range of Wi-Fi provides context to any situation you are in.
What’s changed is having enterprise data the way we have it. The cloud is what’s changed. There was never a way to pull the data we collected—from our calendars, phone calls, meetings—into the enterprise data system. Until now.
Say you are an employee at Best Buy, and you walk into the store. Information can be pushed to you about what you need to do that day, as soon as an IoT-enabled device at the store detects your smartphone. Your day at work might start with a notification on your phone: “Are you starting your shift?” You have the option of tapping yes, no, or defer.
At that point, you are using a workflow process that was kicked off by context received through the store’s IoT infrastructure, as opposed to having to go to a computer in a room set aside for employees, navigating to a screen, and logging in. These types of microtransactions can already happen with cloud business flows that we have developed in enterprise applications.
Let me repeat that: With the existing Wi-Fi devices that places like Best Buy already have, this type of process is already perfectly possible.
When you combine the context of location with the things around you at that particular moment, the IoT infrastructure can be used to lead you directly into other business applications such as calendars, supply chain, inventory, customer engagement, and social tools. The result is that you have to do less navigation and data input. And that’s the type of user experience Oracle is after in designing its user experiences.
It’s All About the Context
The next challenge with IoT is how to get beacons everywhere. When you look at this as a user interface problem, which is how we approach it, you discover that it is an experience problem. The issue isn’t what can we do with beacons, but how we can make it easier for people to set up beacons and attach them to a particular business process.
To use the Best Buy example again, IoT software can be used to program a particular beacon and attach it to a business process. When I walk into the store, it knows I am Jeremy because of the transfer of information between connected devices. Not only can it tell who I am, but it also knows my schedule and where I am in the building, and it can infer perhaps that I am most likely coming to work or leaving for lunch.
That’s how the IoT ties to an enterprise system. It can feed data into the calendar application or the scheduling and seamlessly pull out the next likely task so that you don’t lose momentum as you go about your day. There are all kinds of complicated things you could do, but in essence, it’s really, really simple. And it’s all about the context.
Information by itself is pretty dumb, but when combined with other factors, end users can have the most relevant options pushed to them instead of having to navigate to find it themselves.
We think most user experience applications can be broken down into forms and reports: Forms are what you put in; reports are what you take out. If you present any user with a form containing 60 fields, that user needs to fill in all 60 fields. If we can fill in 55 of those fields using context that comes from beacons and enterprise systems, then the user is presented with only five fields. The amount of learning the user has to do is much reduced. If the fields aren’t accurate, the user can still see and modify them.
The essence of user experience is getting users to produce something of value to them with as few frustrations as possible. It’s our responsibility to do everything we can do to remove those frustrations.
Jeremy Ashley is group vice president of Oracle's Applications User Experience.
Find out more about the Internet of Things on Oracle.com: