Smart Scheduling Becomes The Killer Application

[Andy Sjostrom]

<a href="http://www.devx.com/Intel/Article/15770">http://www.devx.com/Intel/Article/15770</a><br /><br />Smaller devices, smarter services and increasing connectivity puts the user in a peculiar situation. It's becoming easier to stay reachable and online and harder to stay present "in real life". Is smart scheduling the answer? I touched on the subject nine months ago in my post <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3773">"Always connected, never focused"</a>.<br /><br />I spotted the article <a href="http://www.devx.com/Intel/Article/15770">"Making Sense of Mobility"</a> in this weekend's newsletter from <a href="http://www.devx.com/">DevX</a>. The article is supposed to give "you some ideas of how to think about mobile, the users, and the opportunity in the midst of a chaotic technical market" and is a nice business oriented article. What caught my interest was the following scenario description:<br /><br />"Consider the example of a sales representative walking through the grocery store when a critical event occurs. A customer has just canceled a large order. The local application running on the sales reps handheld device parses the corresponding event and issues requests for additional information before notifying him with the bad news. No rushing home to log on the network for more information on the account. No surprises when he gets to the office the next morning. The sales rep has what he needs to begin thinking about saving the sale—customer contact, historical ordering, and current inventory and pricing information—even before he gets to the end of the produce aisle."<br /><br />I have myself often talked about how mobile solutions can enable workers to participate in business processes even without a cable attached to a network outlet. Mobile access to information systems is a great thing for the company, the company's clients and the worker. However, as human beings we need time off, time to reflect, time with our families and kids, and in the mentioned article, time to do grocery shopping. The easy answer is to turn off all electronic devices, but I believe that we'll soon see a more sophisticated and flexible way of notifying systems when I am reachable and when I am not. <!><br /><br />I believe users would get a higher acceptance of connected devices if they could get more control of who and what system can reach them and when. The answer to this is smart scheduling services.<br /><br />I would look for the following features in a first version of smart scheduling:<br />• schedule when events in critical and non-critical information systems can notify me over e-mail and SMS<br />• schedule when my cell phone accepts business related calls<br />• link my schedule to an online account (to me personally this means Passport) so that I can manage it from anywhere<br /><br />The sales scenario in the article does have an interesting passage where it says: "The local application running on the sales reps handheld device parses the corresponding event and issues requests for additional information before notifying him with the bad news.". The requests for additional information could, from a smart scheduling perspective, mean checking the user's availability schedule before deciding whether or not to notify the sales rep.<br /><br />Feel free to voice your opinion or just add more features to the list of fundamental smart scheduling features!

[ricksfiona]

*schedule when events in critical and non-critical information systems can notify me over e-mail and SMS
* schedule when my cell phone accepts business related calls
* link my schedule to an online account (to me personally this means Passport) so that I can manage it from anywhere

Being a person who supplies businesses with technologies to make their lives a little easier, I'm all for automation. However, there is a line in which we go overboard and rely too much on technology for minute, possibly irrevelant increase in convenience.

1) Schedule time for checking e-mail/phone messages. When someone sends you a message labeled 'high priority', create an Outlook rule that will pop-up a message. If there's nothing, forget about it until the next scheduled check.

2) If a work related calls comes into my cellphone during off hours, it better be an emergency. Make sure everyone knows this, just tell them in a nice way.

3) I use ACT! for my schedule. The company also has a web-based ACT! program that can access the schedule database on the server. You can then access your schedule and make any necessary changes with a browser from anywhere on the web. I'm sure you can do this with Lotus Notes as well.

So, the solutions are really here. I just don't see this 'smart scheduling' as the killer application. I personally wouldn't invest much money to make this a little more convenient.

[Pony99CA]

I just don't see this 'smart scheduling' as the killer application. I personally wouldn't invest much money to make this a little more convenient.
It may not be the killer application, but don't dismiss it so lightly. In the middle 20th Century, people were talking about all the time off we'd have from work with labor-saving devices like the computer and the robot.

The sad truth is that, even with computers, we don't get more time off; we're just expected to do more work. And with pagers, cell phones, connected PDAs, the Internet, E-mail and instant messages, we're also more available than before. Yes, we can switch those devices off, but if you miss a critical event, you could be in trouble.

Today we could combine the online presence information of instant messaging with our online scheduling and contact information to make things simpler. Instead of just the few status items that Windows Messenger gives us, for example, imagine something more like E-mail filters. Call them "presence rules".

FOR BOSSES, DISPLAY AVAILABLE
FOR WORK PEOPLE &lt; BOSS, DISPLAY AWAY
FOR MESSAGE STATUS = URGENT, SHOW MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY
FOR MESSAGE STATUS &lt; URGENT, QUEUE MESSAGE

You could have macros that set up a whole set up rules like that, too.

END OF WORK DAY
START OF WORK DAY
WEEKEND
ARRIVAL AT BUSINESS MEETING

Cell phones could also have similar things linked to Caller ID and SMS.

No, I don't think it's a killer application, but it could help us get better, yet flexible, control of our lives.

My old company had a pretty cool idea. It was a voice chat application that a caller could log into. When the caller selected someone to talk to, the system would send an E-mail to that person. When the person looked at the E-mail, a graphic would indicate if the caller was still available, so you had E-mail with presence detection. That allowed the callee the option of handling the call at his convenience.

That's just the start of what we could have.

Steve