By John Ginovsky
In October Microsoft unveiled its
latest and, in some respects revolutionary, version of the Windows operating
system, called Windows 8. The most noticeable new feature is its graphic user
interface-the screen you first see when you boot it up.
Instead of the familiar logo and
the little Start button at the bottom left, the first screen is a mélange of
what Microsoft calls "live tiles" that the user selects, positions, and
programs according to individual needs and preferences. The tiles are more than
button-type icons that call up the related software applications-they
themselves are dynamically and continuously updated with the specific type of
information the user wants to be kept up to date on. That way, the user does
not have to click and boot up the application just to get that particular
information, but can see it right away.
Another Windows 8 feature is that
it uses the same operating system no matter the device-desktop computer,
laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Thus, Microsoft claims, it provides true
mobility and portability, especially within an enterprise. Depending on the
device, the user can interact both by touch access-as with a tablet-or keyboard
and mouse controls.
For an article in its January print
issue, ABA Banking Journal asked
several experts and analysts to describe how this new operating system might
manifest itself within a banking scenario. Here is a review of that article
from the perspective of one Microsoft person and another expert from a bank
technology company.
· First: Victor Dossey, industry technology
strategist for banking, at Microsoft:
"We have a concept of how we
present our application icons to launch them. It's called live tile. They help
Windows 8 differentiate [from other operating systems] from an efficiency
standpoint.
"Before, if I wanted to see if I
had any work to do in some line-of-business application, I'd log in, check,
look around, spend some time, and then realize I had nothing. I'd close the
application and go about my business.
"What live tiles do is they allow
you to provide a bit of information to that icon that you launch the
application with...So, with [certain] Windows 8 applications I can look at the
the icon, the tile, to see whether I have an alert. There would be some color
coding, or a number. I could then tell how many issues I have to deal with, if
any, and I'd go into the application and do my work when I needed to. I can do
all of those things that would have taken me five minutes just to get in and
realize I had nothing, and I can take that down to a glance while I'm on my
start menu."
· Second, Scott Hansen, executive vice president
for business development, Harland Financial Services:
"The Microsoft 8 tablet might be
sitting in a little box, a dock. The tablet, when it's in the dock, is just
like a desktop PC, with a keyboard and mouse. If you want to, you can use your
finger right on the tablet's screen and expand and shrink and swipe and do all
the cool things that a touch screen does.
"You also have the added benefit
that when the bell rings and the person at the front of the branch says ‘Mr.
Johnson is here to see you,' without a shutdown procedure or any kind of
complexity, you grab the tablet and yank it out of the dock. The minute the
tablet is yanked out it knows it needs to establish a wireless connection to
the bank's network. It knows that it's not going to have the keyboard and mouse
anymore. It intuitively changes its behavior of what it's expecting you to do in
order to interact with it, because you're going to be using the touch screen
only.
"You walk over and you talk with
the customer and because the tablet is a real PC, it's running whatever
software that would normally run on the desktop. It could allow you to open up
new accounts, a teller transaction. Anything that the bank applications are
doing on a desktop hooked up to the core, the tablet does, but now it's
wandering around the branch.
"That's one of the things Windows 8
can do for banking. It provides representation for the bank with a single
device that can sit at the desktop, can sit in the branch lobby, or can sit in
the office of the customer's own business."
|
About the Author
John Ginovsky is contributing editor of ABA Banking Journal and editor of the publication's TechTopics e-newsletter.
For more than two decades he has written about the commercial
banking industry. In particular, he's specialized in the
technological side of banking and how it relates to the
actual business of banking. He previously was senior editor
for Community Banker magazine (which merged with ABA Banking Journal) and was a staff writer for ABA's Bankers News. You can email him at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
|
 |
[This article was posted on December 12, 2012, on the website of ABA Banking Journal, www.ababj.com, and is copyright 2012 by the American Bankers Association.]
Trackback(0)
|
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
