Title:  Mobile Computing Algorithms and Systems for User Aware Optimization of Enterprise Applications

Committee:

Dr. Ragupathy Sivakumar, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Faramarz Fekri, ECE

Dr. Umakishore Ramachandran, CoC

Dr. Douglas Blough, ECE

Dr. Karthik Ramachandran, MGT

Dr. Shruti Sanadhya, Facebook

Abstract:

Boosting employee productivity has continually been the focus of enterprises in the recent past. Among the several strategies used by enterprises towards this end, mobilization, or the ability of an employee to rely on their mobile devices to continue to perform business functions even when away from a Desktop, is seen as a game changer. In spite of the promise shown by mobilization, much of its benefits are yet to be realized. While an average global 2000 enterprise uses 1000+ software applications for its business processes, very few of these applications have been successfully deployed for smartphones. Even when the applications are mobilized, users face several barriers in their usage. We argue that these barriers occur because complex enterprise desktop applications are defeaturized for a resource constrained smartphone. In this work, we focus on providing user aware solutions to three specific aspects of mobilization: (1) Content sharing: An enterprise employee spends an inordinate amount of time on Email responding to queries and sharing information with co-workers. In this context, we consider automated information suggestions to ease the burden of reply construction on smartphones; (2) Collaboration: Even though many business processes within enterprises require employees to work together in a team and collaborate with each other, very few enterprise mobile apps allow two employees to simultaneously work on an object from two separate devices. In this context, we present Peek, a mobile-to-mobile remote computing protocol for collaboration that allows the users to interact with an application remotely in a responsive manner; (3) Workflow Mobilization: For an employee to successfully perform workflows on her smartphone, not only does a mobile app need to be available, but also her specific workflow has to make the cut through the defeaturization process necessary for mobilization. In this context, we propose a do-it-yourself (DIY) framework wherein users, irrespective of their skills, can mobilize the workflows themselves.