I was wondering one evening when going through a few articles, whether it was time to venture into the wearables market, in the People & Work management space. Having successfully launched an HCM and PPM software product company, the question was more selfish. However even though, I tried to answer some questions in this small article, the questions that it leaves for me are bewildering.
How many of us have desired to wear a smart watch- Android or iOS, or let me rephrase it, how many of us have contemplated wearing a Smart Watch over the Traditional watches? While, I plan on looking up research in my next article, my objective is to not only reason out the purpose of the Wearable devices at work but also to try and answer the big question- Does the market exist at all!
To answer this I want to go back in time and look back when an office muster, something like a log book was present to mark presence and absence, when tasks were given in a meeting or sent as a note to the person at work- I still remember sticky notes from my boss when I started work.
Then came the magnetic cards that on close proximity with a reader, read your presence. We evolved with technology and today use biological parts of our body to allow a machine to determine whether it’s after all us who are signing in.
Ahh! I don’t want to get into the morality & the reasoning behind why this and why that. Well the simple answer is managing 100 thousand people at various locations from a central location is not easy. Somewhere we need to pay for the Industrial revolution that after all lets us live a fulfilling life.
My question, however still remains- we had to pace with technology, because it helped it to increase ROI’s, in a growing economy, for organizations; that instead provided a better lifestyle. However, will we allow technology to be solemnly worn around the wrist, chest, ankle or any other part of our body that not only would track our movement but also monitor emotions? Argh! Of course not, that technology would be to intervening or would it be? Then what would be acceptable for us.
Tasks, Alerts, Notifications, likes, comments? Would we like to have them on our wrists- I mean purely work related? We already have them on our mobile phones & continue to wear wearables that monitor pulse, and heart beats while we train (but thats for personal use). Why then can’t we have official information streaming to our wrists & some data uploaded on the server? Yes we can, since they only help in providing information required for me at the right time & for the overall benefit of the company- isn’t it?
I tried to answer the question as best as I could, however my article is purely a thought, surfacing from various secondary information that I have been receiving lately. I have been pondering on such questions since the last few years- Whether we give rights to technology to intrude even in our personal space?
Some answers will be answered in my future articles, however it does raise a question- are we ready for it? And if we are, are we ready for the consequences?
One final question to my reader’s- Do we like this intrusion to technology?
