The gadgetization of the enterprise
Knowledge workers spend their day processing and combining many pieces of diverse information from multiple sources. What makes this particularly difficult is that each type of data is stored, managed and viewed through a different application, each of which has its own userid, password and user interface. Compounding the problem is the fact that the needs of each and every knowledge worker are unique.
So the user ends up spending an inordinate amount of their time searching for, retrieving. and making sense of information from multiple applications to complete a single task.
This task is becoming more complex as organizations need to deal with more information and as employees need to rely increasingly on information that is found outside the organization.
Enterprise portals attempted to solve this problem, but they have largely been unsuccessful. One of the primary reasons is that they do not provide the granularity of customization that knowledge workers require.
The answer to this problem lies in gadgets. Gadgets can be viewed as highly custom micro applications designed to solve a specific problem for a specific user. Gadgets are quick and easy to build, customize and deploy. Gadgets empower users to locate and view the information that they need to do their particular job in the way that makes sense to them.
Google makes available thousands of gadgets that are written internally or by users. They have also announced Google Gadget Ventures, designed to fund 3rd party gadget developers. All these gadgets can easily be placed on your iGoogle pages.
Niall Kennedy has some great posts about Google Gadgets (also here). There will be much more about Google gadgets coming soon. Your future will be gadgetized!
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