From the Inside: July/August 2012

Technology is making the office obsolete, but are IT and the enterprise keeping up?

Offices are almost not needed in today's working environment as the Internet, Virtual Desktops, and Cloud applications can been found and accessed from anywhere. Skype is now part of the office space, virtually guaranteeing every employee can attend a meeting. Productivity, costs-analysis, day-to-day monitoring, and budget building can all be performed on a computer anywhere so long as it can link to a collective server.

Not to mention the fact that just about every working person has an iPhone, Blackberry, Samsung, or HTC Android phone — or some other model of smartphone. What once use to be laptops, cell phones, and daily trips to the office, is now becoming smartphones, tablets, video conferencing, and e-mail, then spending the day on site or doing sales calls.

Even in warehouse production jobs, more and more of the manager's time is spent on the floor than in the office doing paperwork. Automation and the paperless office has always been the goal of business, and new technology has been pushing that fast and hard, not to mention being more successful at it.

While many professionals, mainly IT, question the reliability of cloud computing and the consequences of relying too much on it, the current IT spending is moving further and further from the traditional office. But the enterprise software development, security, and infrastructure is not.

While existing management styles focus on the office as a place to control productivity and need the IT infrastructure to support it, the day-to-day work is progressing outside those controls. That is upsetting management and IT.

Imposing the controls that used to work in a normal office structure to a mobile or virtual environment does not work, as many businesses are finding out. While some businesses try to control the mobile environment by controlling the hardware, more and more IT experts are suggesting using application and software controls, leaving the hardware and UI interface in the employee's hands. (See my last FTI - BYOD)

Now back to my original sentence… are the enterprise and business applications ready for this? No, I don't believe we are. Too many of our systems have been built around the office and the controls and security that the office provides, and less about using the data and software in a virtual and mobile environment.

If we don't go mobile and change our systems to provide controls and security through the application, not the hardware, our applications are going to fail. Everyone else outside the MultiValue space calls this Cloud Computing; I like to call it… business as usual. But many of our applications are built around the desktop or desktop UI.

Those have to change. If they don't change, IT beware!

Workers are expecting you to provide them their data when and where they want it, and now know enough to know that it is possible. iTunes and the Google Play has succeeded in making our job harder by setting user expectations.

Innovate your MultiValue Application or your MultiValue Application will die! If you don't know how, then you need to plan on join us at the 2013 conference. There will be a lot of knowledge delivered about Mobile apps (iPhone, Android, Microsoft Metro, etc.) and how to interface them with the MultiValue application.

Nathan Rector

Nathan Rector, President of International Spectrum, has been in the MultiValue marketplace as a consultant, author, and presenter since 1992. As a consultant, Nathan specialized in integrating MultiValue applications with other devices and non-MultiValue data, structures, and applications into existing MultiValue databases. During that time, Nathan worked with PDA, Mobile Device, Handheld scanners, POS, and other manufacturing and distribution interfaces.

In 2006, Nathan purchased International Spectrum Magazine and Conference and has been working with the MultiValue Community to expand its reach into current technologies and markets. During this time he has been providing mentorship training to people converting Console Applications (Green Screen/Text Driven) to GUI (Graphical User Interfaces), Mobile, and Web. He has also been working with new developers to the MultiValue Marketplace to train them in how MultiValue works and acts, as well as how it differs from the traditional Relational Database Model (SQL).

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Jul/Aug 2012

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