Mike Brown, CIO of Lowe’s, in an interview with Bloomberg on the purchase of 42,000 iPhones as point of sale (POS) devices:

Forget about the competition, we are playing catch-up with the customer psyche.

CI professionals need to follow Brown’s lead. A substitution of tablets and smartphones for cash registers promises both to improve customer experience and to transform face-to-face customer interactions into a stream of behavioral and contextual data. The benefits of digitizing human channels through consumer devices include:

• Adding clickstream analysis to human interactions. As sales associates interact with customers, their devices can relay clickstream data back to the company’s data warehouse. For example, Pfizer’s tablet program allows it to track doctors’ content consumption patterns during sales presentations. Using interaction management, firms can test real-time content variations to optimize the sales process.
• Expanding customer data integration options. By using the phones for mobile POS, employees will pull in customer identity. Firms can also add new methods for data capture – such as Bump-style, near-field communications – into its consumer and enterprise apps. As sales associates transfer a shopping list to the customer’s phone, the device can capture and associate customer identifiers and contextual information with the interaction.

We are learning once again that what people want most is to be free
John Quincy Adams (sixth President of the US) said: "Who but shall learn that freedom is the prize…and on the oppressor's head to break the chain." Glorious change. Monumental change. Empowerment and Freedom. I submit humbly but with absolute conviction to all of you that we are in the midst of revolution in personal computing - the extent of which we will only fully comprehend once it's over, and established vendors and IT leaders alike are scattered on the side of the road.

It's not about Microsoft vs. Apple or Google vs. Apple. It's about freedom. Freedom from control. Freedom from establishments. Freedom of identity. Freedom from IT departments too understaffed and ill-equipped to help. Freedom from layers of management agents and miscellaneous junk that sap minutes to hours of productive time from our lives every day. The price of compliance and security you say? Hogwash.

End user experience is at an all-time low
The end user experience has deteriorated to the point that we sit and wait while the hourglass spins, as IT's remote bots take inventory, or install software updates while we're frantically trying to get our slides together for a customer meeting. The mindless bots scan for threats and lock the cursor while we're trying to write an e-mail, and we get embarrassing pop-up reminders while we're presenting to rooms full of people to make sure we know to update Adobe Acrobat. We're as mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more! Who gave someone the right to assume that what their tool needs to do at any given moment is more important than the work we have to get done?

High performers are being hanged for taking matters into their own hands

Finally, SAP Is Acquiring (At Least A Mobile) Middleware

SAP’s customers and the analyst community have been speculating about the possibility of SAP acquiring a middleware company for a while. After it had missed out on acquiring one of the heavyweights like BEA and hesitated over TIBCO and Progress Software, SAP and Sybase agreed yesterday on the $5.8 billion transaction.

Sybase used to be a database, but its database’s visibility in the market decreased so dramatically that, in a recent Forrester survey, it wasn’t considered to be a primary database choice by any application domain. A good share of the 4% of open source databases used in the ERP space are actually SAP’s open source MaxDB (based on SOFTWARE AG’s original ADABAS D), which is a default for SAP systems if a customer doesn’t provide a third-party database like Oracle or DB2. SAP is unlikely to replace this default database with Sybase. This would be an even less important database than MaxDB, which integrates well with NetWeaver. But different analysts have different opinion and you might like to look for Boris Evelson's take on the impact of Sybase's database. If SAP runs a careful post-merger process, it will recognize Sybase’s database knowledge and employ all the engineers who have already developed in-memory database capabilities to bring Hasso’s idea from the Palo Alto “garage” to full product availability. While SAP has deployed in-memory capabilities in its analytics technology stack, the in-memory capabilities for transactions are still in the lab.

HP's acquisition of Palm is all over the twitterverse at the moment. And everyone has an opinion on it, and what it means (which brings to mind one of my favorite movie quotes). There are precious few facts around at present - and only time will tell exactly how the acquisition will pan out. Either way, CIOs should know the following facts about HP and the acquisition of Palm: