Business
Office Mobile Analytics
Application Stacks
Web 2.0
Repositories
• Figure 1 (left).
Knowledge work
on a large display
(Source: SAP).
• Figure 2.
Decoupling of capability, content, and
technical container.
may be moved, clustered, annotated,
or synthesized to analyze information and capture insights. Areas on
the display might represent certain
task contexts typical for knowledge-intensive work, such as prioritizing,
querying, inspecting, and displaying
analytical information.
From this example, it should
become obvious that content,
application, and device need to be
decoupled as much as possible to
allow users to focus on information
without being confined to a particu-
lar pre-packaged application context.
With the continued proliferation of
cloud computing and virtualization
of data persistency, content will be
increasingly decoupled from con-
tainers and accessible independent
of a particular application. This
requires the definition of new prin-
ciples of how data objects (content)
interact with their context (con-
tainer) and how this flexibility can
be leveraged to enable end users to
compose and transform content as
required in an actual task situation
[ 3, 4, 5]. When content is decoupled
from the container (application,
device, software stack), there is an
opportunity to design natural, task-
motivated new environments in
which multiple capabilities and data
coexist and can be put in contextual
relationship at use time rather than
at design time.
March + April 2012