Like many aspects of enterprise IT, Gargan thinks that the ubiquitous trend for the consumerisation of technology is also at work here. In particular, younger people and those who have grown to adulthood with technology in their hands see these kinds of technologies in different ways to their elders.
“The so-called millennials are actually driving a lot of innovation from the consumer space into the enterprise. It used to be that we would have our enterprise apps at work and consumer apps in our private life, and never the two would meet. But increasingly younger people expect to have access to the same kind of intuitive tools at work that they use at home and in their private lives,” he said. “They expect the same level of design and performance standards, and see that as the most obvious way to work.
“We are developing context-aware computing because we believe it has the potential to provide significant benefits that can empower end users and the enterprise as a whole. Context-aware computing can provide task-relevant information or services, automate or make tasks more efficient, and improve decision making through context-driven recommendations,” Intel white paper
Misunderstood concept
One misunderstanding of the concept of context-aware applications is that they are always centred on mobile devices, according to Roland Trisch, director of business and application services for BAS Fujitsu Ireland.
“Obviously everybody has their own definition of what context-aware is, but there is a kind of knee-jerk reaction to presume it’s all about mobile, and that’s not necessarily true. All it really means is that you can get contextual information from the edge of a system. That could be mobile, but it doesn’t have to be,” he said.
“Location is one dimension or context. But the way we are looking at this, talking about it and implementing it with customers and industry is that-context aware has multiple dimensions — while location is definitely one of them, it’s not necessarily the most important.”
Trisch pointed out that a truly contextually-aware application should be made up of two halves – one that looks after the mechanics of a task and a second half that yields an end result. The first half should make use of four important factors: where, who, when and what.
Four ‘W’
“The first of the four Ws is ‘where’ and makes reference to location, the second is ‘who’, as in who is interacting with the application, the third is ‘when’ is the application being used and does time have a role to play, and the last is ‘what’ is that person attempting to do,” he said.
“The interesting thing that happens when you bring these four elements together to achieve a goal and to materialise value is that you are left with an incredibly powerful piece of data for analysing. You can say ‘ok, that person was doing this, in that location at that point in time’. And that combination can give insight that can be used for other goals,” he said.
According to Trisch, the future of context-aware will have many different facets, including safety.
“For instance, the context might be that I am texting or that I am updating my status on Facebook to say I’m going for a bike ride. There is movement on my smart phone to show that I am actually riding my bike but 10 minutes later, there is sudden stillness,” he said. “In that case an app might know what I was doing and that after 10 minutes there was no movement, leading to the conclusion that I might have crashed my bike and could be lying on the ground unable to move. That’s a pretty useful app if you ask me.”
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