In his classic 1968 book The Peter Principle, Laurence J. Peter offered a series of tongue-in-cheek observations about work, organizations, and human nature.  Among them was his claim there is an inverse relationship between the cost of a proposed budget item and the amount of discussion it generates among decision-makers: the smaller the item, the longer the debate, and vice versa. 

As it turns out, a similar principle applies in technology development, or so it would seem from the experience of Vivisimo, a seven-year old Pittsburgh-based spin-off of Carnegie Mellon University in the corporate information search business.  Here's how it works: when the question involves the details of product interfaces, features, and functions, for example, the company applies rigorous customer research methods to ferret out answers and get their product right.

But when it comes to bigger issues, like whether to provide its service to stationary desktops at the client's site or broadcast it to mobile devices everywhere in the world, Vivisimo turns to history for answers.  And when it comes to designing specific product elements and evaluating system performance, the company tends to look within itself. 

The historical record

"To make product decisions on how to do something, look at what has been done in the past," suggests Vivisimo Chief Scientist Jerome Pesenti.  "We look at history.  When the Web came out, the browser was going to be the lame little interface and Microsoft was all about proprietary applications.  But we are moving more toward doing everything Web-enabled through a browser interface and Software as a Service. 

"When you're in uncharted territory, you don't have customer data.  The customers don't know more than you do; they actually know much less - you need to guide them.  But you don't want to just pull it out of your head; you have to look at historical data and see what other people have done in similar environments and see if you can reproduce what's right or wrong," he said. 

In the case of accessing data from cell phones and other handheld devices, the great arc of history points to more, not less mobility.  "People will be able to access information from anywhere from mobile devices," he said.  "There's a clear trend, and it's not difficult to see.  The number of things people are going to do on a mobile device is going to keep on growing - it's going to become the office outside the office.  And they'll do it through a regular interface, which is going to be a Web browser; the applications will get adapted to it.  Whatever you can imagine you want to do on a mobile device, you will be able to do, and people need to be ready for that.  Every software vendor needs to have a mobile strategy.  No question about it."

But increased mobility isn't the only long-wave trend shaping the technology environment.  Others are easy to see as well.  Although most of them will never be fully met, each can serve as a marker on the distant horizon to help orient decisions made today.  Among them: providing full access to all information; providing open access to all users; providing every user with instantaneous access; and providing it all for free. 

Introspection

But for the shorter term - particularly when addressing immediate product issues in new areas of technology - the lessons of history may not be clear, if they're visible at all.  So Vivisimo takes a different approach.  "We use it ourselves," Pesenti said.  "We benchmark it against our own use to see if it's working or not, if it's satisfying our needs.  Because we are a corporation like other corporations, we have very similar needs." 

That may not be ideal, but it's better than nothing.  "There's no silver bullet.  You don't have a customer who says ‘hey, this is exactly what I need, and exactly how I want it, and here's exactly what you need to do.'  If that were the case, it would be very simple.  But when you're in uncharted waters, that doesn't happen.  So if you look at what has been done before in a similar context and use it yourself, you can benchmark it in your own corporation and get feedback because you would be the first one actually using it," he said.

Browser standard

For most software vendors who are attempting to build their own mobile strategies, one of the key questions will be whether to provide handheld access to their products through standard Web browsers or some sort of proprietary software interface.

Different vendors have reached different conclusions.  Salesforce.com, for example, requires users to download its own proprietary software in order to access the client data it keeps housed on its servers.  So do a number of other vendors.  But for Vivisimo, which provides secure but read-only access, the better answer is to go with the browsers that come already installed on most cell phones.  And recent actions by Apple, which sharply restrict the installation of third-party software into their iPhones, may confirm the wisdom of Vivisimo's generic approach.

However making an application mobile-friendly isn't always easy, Pesenti acknowledged.  "One of the challenges with enterprise search is getting mobile access to a lot of applications out there," he said.  "The standard is to make applications mobile-ready.  That can be extremely complicated.  Some of these applications require pretty advanced interfaces and they aren't mobile-ready.  Salesforce.com is actually a Web application, but they really don't have a mobile interface unless you install some kind of software on the mobile device - which is ironic because their slogan is that they're a ‘no-software' company." 

Accessing information from the Babel of applications, communications, and document formats that keep any enterprise running can present a bewildering array of options.  "The whole business is about finding a single point of access to all these repositories," Pesenti observed.  "The nice thing is that once you do this, you can actually provide access to a lot of sources in many different formats through alerts or through the Web browser or through a mobile device.  What you gain is a way to access a lot of sources that are not necessarily browser-ready or mobile-ready through a Web browser.  By creating templates for a mobile device, we can actually allow people to access all information in the network through a mobile device and even display it.  We have templates to display the documents.  We convert them - Word documents and PDF documents and so on - to an HTML format, and we can tailor that HTML format to any mobile device."