Mobilizing Software: a New Era of Asynchronous Productivity

by Chris S. Thomas and Matt Gillespie

Introduction

The asynchronous operation required by mobilized software leads to significant productivity gains.

Wireless computing is taking the world by storm in much the same way as cell phones did some years ago. Wireless data access, including WiFi, is gradually becoming ubiquitous, but as with cell phone networks, there will always be geographic gaps in service availability. The difference is that, while telephone service is necessarily synchronous (for the most part, voicemail not withstanding), computer applications need not be. Applications are evolving in order to support the mobilized workplace and lifestyle, so that when a user loses connectivity, they do not lose their productivity.

The Mobilized Software Initiative (MSI) is driving change in the industry at large to accommodate this change. Software must be intelligent enough to interpret changes in the environment well beyond the capacity of the traditional terminal-host environment. One dilemma for mobile users today is that online services typically follow a traditional terminal-host model, in which the client is tethered to the host, and where users must log into a central server in order to interact with their applications.

That design works poorly in a wireless world, where clients roam freely and must be able to work effectively in an environment of intermittent connectivity. If users log in and their connection drops in and out, they will get frustrated quickly if they have to log in again repeatedly. The expectation for users to be continually connected to the business environment is unrealistic in the mobilized context. Mobilized applications focus instead on being available, connectable or accessible, with built in resilience to network interruptions or transitions thru asynchronous communication mechanisms. Applications and services that continue to demand constant connectivity will become increasingly obsolete as the mobilized capabilities increase the productivity, reliability and expectations of mobile users.

Breaking Down the Tethered Mentality

Currently, the opportunity for failure on the part of applications and service providers is high. As users start to mobilize, the threat of repeated error messages flooding call centers and yielding trouble tickets requiring application behavioral change is real.

Applications must be designed to support the full variety of ways that users may choose to work. Why make them work in such a way as to demand specific or continuous connectivity, since we know that connectivity is not always available? One powerful way to think of this shift is to recognize that many of the most-often-used connected applications already work in a mobility-friendly way. E-mail clients, for example, have for years typically assumed that they are offline, until they process a timed or manual prompt to send and receive to the server -- then they go and determine whether a connection is available.

Client/server models where, for example, a browser must be connected to a Web site in order to function, are very frustrating to work with in an intermittently connected environment, but they have nevert heless become more prevalent in the past six or seven years as the Internet has grown exponentially. The nature of forcing people to go and get information, rather than pushing it out to them, precludes many applications and people from using the information at all.

One of my least-favorite manifestations of this shortcoming is the case of magazine publishers trying to get me to fill out some information in exchange for a free subscription. These offers typically come in email and require me to logon to their web site to register. They sit in my inbox until I have some spare time to look at them, which often happens when I am in transit and not connected. Thus, their plea for me to connect to their Web site and fill out a form is not successful.

If, on the other hand, they simply sent me an e-mail with the form included, I could fill it out offline to be sent automatically the next time I am connected. Analogous shifts in mentality that take advantage of asynchronous messaging would make many such user experiences more successful. The nature of the change is a productivity change. Liberating users from the tethered mentality affords them a competitive advantage, which in turn presents the opportunity for a competitive advantage to the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that enable that productivity change.

Ushering in an New Personal Productivity Explosion

Back in the 1960s, we had a strictly terminal-host model, where the user was logged into a monolithic central machine. You had to call a COBOL programmer to change a report in your business environment, which was laborious and costly for the user, the programmer, IT, and ultimately the business. In the mid-1980s, the rise of the PC and associated user-oriented applications changed all that, allowing individual users to create spreadsheets, reports, and databases that meet their needs for individual projects without external technical support.

We must now think in terms of what is going to enable the broadest market possible to adopt these capabilities. Standards that allow maximum interoperability of multiple platforms are needed to increase the likelihood of success. Using asynchronous web services standards, for example, mobilized software will allow for new user productivity solutions that look a lot like enterprise applications. Enterprise Application Integration environments will start to look a lot like client application integration spaces, targeting individual users with the capability to tie desktop applications together to communicate like enterprise applications through Web services.

Macromedia, for instance, is now is shipping Macromedia Central*, which sets up a foundation based on client-side Web services infrastructure on which to build applications, allowing users to link them together to work as one. Another example of this modality is shown by their Movie Finder application, which automatically goes out and asynchronously grabs information like show times and reviews, caching it for offline use.

Intel worked with Macromedia during the launch of the Macromedia Central product to build an asynchronous hot-spot finder. Here is an example of information that truly needs to be available in an offline context; although there are numerous hotspot finders available online, including one provided by Intel, we typically are not connected at the moment we’re in need of a hotspot!

The productivity revolution of the 1980s democratized information by providing the capability for users to have their reports change on demand, rather than when they could get a COBOL programmer to change it. The new productivity revolution will provides information on demand, rather than when users can get access to a network. The next generation of the Web is an MSI-enabled, use-it-anywhere modality, and services that do not support this new functionality are going to seem outmoded quickly.

The Opportunity for Wireless ISVs Has Arrived

Just as the proliferation of PCs in the 1980s spelled opportunity for software vendors, the new generation of mobilized applications is an emerging sphere of opportunity for the next several years. Information and services are now widely available via the Internet, but the means people are using to access that information is changing because of the widespread adoption of wireless client devices.

Thus, mobilized software is the most important new value proposition for the software industry to embrace, enable, and benefit from. There are really two manifestations of this new paradigm: mobilized documents and mobilized applications.

Mobilized documents allow for paperless workflow, using electronic replicas of paper-based forms. This will allow users to fill out an electronic, offline form and to submit it directly into the workflow as an XML document, rather than as a database record. The significance of this shift is easily seen in the context of a business department that wants to send out forms for its clients to request more information about a product or service.

In the old database model, that department would need to have IT build them a back-end system to host the information, along with appropriate reporting and related mechanisms to make use of the information once it was received. In the case of mobilized documents, on the other hand, information coded in XML is embedded into the documents making it possible for any number of applications to utilize, route or store the information.

Microsoft InfoPath*, which is available as an add-on to Office* 2003, addresses this need by providing a dynamic, programmatic elements to everything from Word* documents to Excel* spreed sheets. Adobe has released similar technology for PDFs making it possible to put a “Submit” button right into downloaded documents. Both are use XML and asynchronous Web services standards to communicate. A few early adopters have begun using this technology, although we are for the most part still in the development phase. As the first proofs of concept become successful, we should expect to see more commercial platforms emerge in 2004.
Mobilized applications innovate around the concept of users logging in so they can see data. In the past, interfaces to back-end systems generally consisted of a portal put up by the enterprise that acted as a gateway, allowing browsers to display information in a non-native format. The underlying information might be in a database, an XML document, or a word-processing document, which the porta l converts to HTML.

In so doing, the portal changes the format of the data and strips out some information, such as database fields or the XML schema, which might be useful. In addition, users are forced to go out and find this information when they need it, which requires connectivity and also the time investment to look for the information, possibly from many different sources.

The innovations that are being engendered by software mobilization reach beyond the ability to use them offline. By making more communications occur on an asynchronous basis, human-to-machine communications are replaced by machine-to-machine communications, which are superior in terms of both efficiency and quality.

Some of the newer mobilized applications can provide an automated engine that subscribes to the data it needs asynchronously, and the fact that the communication is machine-to-machine instead of human-to-machine means that it does not need to be rendered in a human-readable form, with the corresponding loss of context described above. Thus, a personal-finance application, for instance, can keep stock-price data fresh in the background, without user interaction, and the most-complete data set possible can be processed by local applications.

These innovations will create new hours in the week for workforces, providing a clear competitive advantage both to the enterprises that adopt these technologies and for the ISVs that innovate the first and most effective manifestations of it.

Conclusion and Call to Action

A primary obstacle to this sphere of innovation will be the potential for migration to proprietary, rather than standards-based architectures. Intel supports the rapid advancement of standards-based mobilized architectures through initiatives like the Intel® Software Partner Program Mobility track, as well as silicon support and tools for mobilization challenges like power management. Expertise is also available to the industry through such organizations as Intel® Solution Services.

Software developers must rise to the challenge of mobilized software. In the not-so-distant future, all software will be mobilized, and we must embrace it now while the foundation is being set for the success of the next generation of ISVs that will benefit from this wave of innovation.

End users and enterprise administrators must demand that their needs be met in this area. The profound growth in productivity promised by innovative mobilized software is too great to be squandered by a wait-and-see attitude.

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