Personal Cloud Apps and Event Driven Automation
Our “A” line of office furniture, Knoll, has come up with another great insight into today’s work environment. They have noted 10 Tech Trends that are Redefining the Business World. In this post, we are going to look at two of these trends: Personal Cloud Apps and Event-Driven Automation.
Personal Cloud Apps
From the report: “For several years now, businesses have noticed a transformation known as the consumeriszation of IT. In its simplest terms, this means BYOD (bring your own device). And, as it turns out, workers have been bringing not just their own devices, but a slew of personal apps as well.
By most accounts, BYOD has already made the jump from trend to outright ubiquity. Now it remains for companies to get a handle on the myriad of personal cloud apps their workers are using to manage business data. And there’s no use fighting it: Innovation in personal mobile apps is practically unstoppable, as apps like Dropbox and Evernote build in new productivity features at a blistering pace, giving workers an ever-updating suite of new tools to manage their increasingly complex workloads.
If there was ever a time to take stock of the personal apps your teams are using in the workplace, it’s now. By implementing enterprise-class accounts on the cloud services your workers are already using, you can take better advantage of these apps’ advanced features while mitigating the risks associated with hosting your business data on accounts outside your IT department’s control.”
Event-Driven Automation
From the report: “For most of the Internet’s history, web apps have been like isolated fiefdoms, compiling users’ data in walled gardens inaccessible to outside apps. But, thanks to the growing popularity of open application programming interfaces (APIs), our favorite apps are learning to play nice with each other in increasingly useful ways. The hottest result so far: event-driven automation, which lets you automatically monitor your favorite apps and sites for specific kinds of events, and triggers useful actions when the right events take place. The concept of event-driven automation began gaining traction with simple features like Google Alerts, which simply notifies you when a new entry matching a specific search term appears on the Web. A site called IFTTT (for “If This, Then That”) has been catching on fast with tech 1-percenters, enabling more sophisticated automation through connected web apps. You can set up triggers to do things like monitor your Gmail inbox and automatically add incoming photo attachments to a Flickr account, or track business mileage in a Google spreadsheet just by texting your latest mileage to a given number.”
What it means for you
Business is now being done on mobile. And your workers want to use the same productivity apps for both their personal and work lives. You can adapt to this trend by using the professional, made-for-business versions of apps like Dropbox and Evernote to get your company’s work done and keep your associates happy. Use IFTTT to tie personal and business apps together. This will help you be more productive and profitable.