A Better Mobile Strategy: Quantify This.

CES 2013 helped ring in the technology new year with "more of the everything", but at face value it lacked the disruptive  feel of some of past years.   In my opinion the true tipping point of economies of scale will take hold during 2013, and the fruit of much investment in ecosystems will be evident by mid-year.    Advertising strategies are being aggressively revamped around mobile only/mobile first thinking, and early successes in mobile retail and mobile banking are being rapidly copied around the globe, and this will be reflected in GDP and real returns in the coming months and years.   So it goes, as the momentum of an early mainstream market rapidly brings in new investment in digital marketing, enterprise managed mobility and the other pillars of a mobile, digital economy.  

But how does a CEO link this to the real physical world?   How do organizations and ecosystems take advantage of Ubermobile's Top Ten list for 2013?  That's where the notions of quantified self and quantified enterprise come in.    

At a personal level, the uptake of social networks, digital banking and everywhere commerce are pushing consumers in the mainstream to manage their digital lives, and emerging viewpoints like quantified self and quantified mind  promote the idea that lifestyles can be improved by actively managing a personal dashboard of life to improve your family, health, finance, leisure, and business pursuits.  For consumers, this quantified self trend will be reinforced by the digitial fabric of everywhere commerce, digital banking, and social in a never ending cycle that reinforces the quantification of the individual consumer.  (And that's not counting the influence of quantification place on people from mobile business applications and content - but more on that in another blog).   A major opportunity awaits for ecosystems who can most effectively and efficiently tie this quantified self cycle together - and the linchpin for the quantified self is...user experience. 

So at the business level, many CEOs are considering the implication of all the new gadgetry and linking them together in the Internet of Things.   As ecosystems become more adept at the Internet of Things, they find that changing human behavior plays a large role in revenue models, and that's where quantified enterprise comes in.    Vendors and CIOs find that they can reach consumers if and only if they get much more adept at context aware computing  and multichannel experience delivery - otherwise all of the insights gleaned might increase the bottom line, but won't signal new markets or business models....and the linchpin for quantified enterprise is...user experience.  

The most successful CEOs will be the ones who best cultivate and match their quantified self and quantified enterprise investements.  This will be impossible to scale without harnessing Big Data, the Cloud and mobile virtualization technologies as an underpinning for both quantified self and quantified enterprise.  And it will be impossible to win without winning the last mile of user experience.    

Net-net:  2013 marks the year to get your quantified game on, and to put plans and metrics in place to guide investment in building and linking the viewpoints of quantified self and quantified mind.