In The Next Version

You can't attend a conference or webinar these days without hearing how social, location, mobile, gamification, cloud and big data are currently the most influential trends in enterprise software. Of these, location is currently getting the least amount of attention, but that may be changing soon. Take for example Tibco, who have just announced some location features to their Tibbr product.

So what role should location play in enterprise software? I think the best way to answer that is to start by saying what I don't want it to be... "FourSquare for the Enterprise." I can't see companies wanting employees to compete over being Leader of the Lunchroom or Ruler of the Water Cooler. However, I do think a great deal of value could be derived from adding location as a layer of metadata stored with objects that are part of a business processes. Those objects could be things like people, customer records, inventory, steps in a workflow, status updates, etc.

If location was stored with objects, that data could then be used to filter information, just like how facets such as time and author are used today. This could lead to location-specific activity streams, similar to how Google+ provides a "Nearby" stream in their mobile apps. Location is not just reserved for people though. Say a new customer prospect was entered into your CRM system and that record was broadcast into your activity stream along with the customer's location. If an employee was subscribed to updates based on that location, they may be able to help close the deal.

In other words, location is an important data point that could be used to reduce the rapidly increasing amount of information that is being pushed into activity streams.

Another way location could help is to assist employees as they travel. Imagine visiting a customer location or remote office and having your social software automatically provide you information about the facility such as where to park, maps to the visitor center, places to eat and a list of local colleagues you're connected with (or others like you that are visiting) all based on knowing your location. Take it a step further and imagine if the system automatically informed your people working there that you were visiting and they could reach out to you to try and meetup.

There are many ways in which location can play a pivotal role in helping navigate the sea of information we're all drowning in. Based on conversations I've had with several vendors I know we're going to see a lot of advancements in this area. If you're a software vendor and you're not working on this already, you better start as you're already way behind.





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