The concept of situational applications, software written to be "good enough" for a very focused, limited set of requirements, has been around for a long time now. Of late, with the rise of Web 2.0 models of application delivery, the concept has enjoyed a renaissance, driven by vendors and advocates (most prominently, Jonathan Sapir of SilverTree Systems) pointing out the possibilities of SaaS and PaaS solutions to fill this role.

I've pointed out previously that there has traditionally been considerable danger in these "good enough" user-driven applications in that they can lead to data silos in the organization that the CIO will be forced to deal with and de-duplicate at some point in the future, should they prove successful. The concept has been tarred and feathered in IT management circles for so long that it's become something of a trope, an idea that most CIOs discard out of hand.

The way that these applications are being developed and deployed is different, however. The iPhone and Apple's AppStore have revolutionized the specific-purpose application. These new situational apps have a different pedigree than their predecessors. They fit the model of centralized data and security while distributing functionality and control in ways that many earlier generation situational applications did not. This is due in no small part, I believe, to the platform they are being developed for: you would have a tough time building out a full scale payroll system for the iPhone. But putting a front-end on an existing SaaS package? No problem.

Another difference is that, traditionally, situational applications were seen as having been developed either by end-users or at least very close to that level of the organization. It was presumed that no one else would have the incentive to drill down to so specific a need, to devote valuable development time to such specific and relatively trivial requirements. But that view didn't take the economic incentives of the AppStore into consideration. Professional developers, by scratching a very focused itch that users had on a small scale in many different organizations, could attract such compensation as they felt their due in ways that could never happen in a single company. So the quality of the code and interface has been well beyond that which most amateur developers could provide in the past.

It's not just the iPhone that makes this possible, of course. Sapir is quite correct when he notes the potential for PaaS and SaaS powered situational apps, and the web itself has seen an explosion of what Jason Kottke has labeled "Single Serving Sites" that may be even more narrowly focused that the most narrowly focused iPhone application. I think the key to the future of the situational application, though, will be combination of development tools that allow developers to produce them relatively quickly, combined with a platform that allows easy monetization of those efforts, probably across a broad audience. So far, the iPhone seems to be the only thing that has combined those elements in the right proportion, but I don't doubt that we will see more coming.

As Microsoft and other traditional enterprise IT vendors cede through inaction or befuddlement territory in the mobile and online services, it seems left to a few upstarts and the titans at Google and Apple to compete over the fertile ground at the edges of the consumer/enterprise interface. Unfortunately, the competition has been lackluster and neither of the major players has shown a deep understanding of enterprise IT wants and needs or any urgency in providing for them.

Both Apple and Google have thrown some token features out, mostly to appease the consumers using their solutions rather than the IT departments at their companies. The goal seems to have been to meet the bare minimum that corporate IT will find acceptable, and even then only in areas where circumvention is more or less impossible, such as e-mail interface with industry-standard Exchange servers.

But apparently someone at these companies understands that there is a lucrative enterprise market still out there. Google's recent announcement that Apps customers would have the ability to enforce password requirements on mobile devices and to remotely wipe corporate data is an indicator that enterprise requirements are being taken seriously at some level.

This implementation reflects the ideal combination of the consumer approach to meeting enterprise needs; the flexibility of the Apps mobile sync solution allows it to deploy seamlessly onto iPhone, Nokia E-series, and Windows Mobile (and soon, Android) devices, while the administration and restrictions can be implemented at the Apps control panel by administrators without any additional intervention or deployment at the device level. This sort of simplicity and centralization is exactly what cloud solutions promise for IT departments, while allowing individuals to follow their own preferences at the device level. What could be more ideal for CIOs than to off-load the many troubles and travails of device-level support, while retaining the necessary security and service control within the IT department?

David Coursey at PC World feels this indicates that Google is spending more time on enterprise features than on the Apps themselves, and the glacial pace of Apps improvements would seem to bear this out, but I don't think the two are either related or mutually exclusive. Google, and Apple, for that matter, need to focus on detailed, robust enterprise-friendly features of this sort to expand successfully beyond the markets they have already forged from the consumer-side. In their own way, these features are every bit as important to CIOs as spreadsheet pivot tables or document scripting capabilities in the Apps themselves. If Google is aiming for the 80% solution that will solve the needs of most consumers, I would say they have hit it already with Apps; they have yet to get to that same level with enterprise features.

And you thought I was just kidding about the IT staff robots with the big red reboot buttons on their foreheads when I mentioned my dream earlier this week.

An intrepid reader pointed me toward the post "Meet R2: Your robotic co-worker courtesy of NASA, GM" which pretty much perfectly realizes my vision, except for, well, the reboot button. I am sure they will offer that as an option.

The development partnership behind these robots is a bizarre study of opposite ends of the robotic employment spectrum: GM, as you might expect, wants to use them to help test car safety... glorified crash test dummies. NASA, on the other hand, wants to use them as astronauts. Coming up with a design that can withstand the rigors of those two environments certainly suggests some common cause, but what astronaut wants a robot buddy riding shotgun whose twin brother is expected to accomplish no more virtuous feat of navigation than to plow an Aveo into a cinderblock wall?

At any rate, there are many IT staff I have met over the years who I would have wholeheartedly recommended for positions in the crash-test field, so I have no doubt that these robots will successfully make the crossover into the IT industry. And as I suggested, this will be a boon to the CIO. Just imagine, employees you can slap on the forehead with no repercussion from the pesky folks over in the HR department! Who among us has not fantasized of just such a job? It might be enough to get me out of consulting and back behind a desk working for The Man. Until, of course, someone figures out a way to make a CIO robot with a big red reboot button on its forehead. Maybe this trend isn't so terrific after all.

Just kidding, there are no people involved. But that's usually a plus when it comes to IT, isn't it? What CIO in his or her right mind doesn't want a staff composed entirely of robots... robots with big, red "REBOOT" switches right in the middle of their foreheads? Is that only my dream? Huh.

But anyway, HP isn't about to deliver that idealized workforce to you. Instead, they have halved both size and cost of their Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD), dropping it to a 20 foot shipping container weighing only 50,000 pounds, and cutting the price to a quite manageable $600,000. Which, I should note, is about what I would expect to pay for one of the aforementioned robots. But again, to be clear, those don't appear to be on sale from HP. Yet.

The whole datacenter-in-a-box thing has sort of disappeared from the limelight of late as cloud-computing and other means of off-loading processing entirely have come to the forefront. For the geeks among us, sure, it's neat to think that these things may be lined up in the Arctic tundra somewhere providing Google's data center services (they aren't, to my knowledge, but I wouldn't put it past them) but it's of little application to most CIOs. There are those few who are tasked with providing data processing services in remote, difficult-to-connect, low-bandwidth, rugged terrain, for whom these must be a boon, but that isn't in very many job descriptions these days... fewer and fewer as remote connectivity continues to improve. If the Air Force can fly Predators over Afghanistan from a bunker near Las Vegas, there isn't much of a frontier left for heavy duty data processing remotely.

Still, if you are among those with that need, you just got a way to fill it at half the price. Until the IT robot staff start rolling off the line, I suppose that's about as much as we can ask for.

So, since we are talking about business pads anyway, we might as well talk about the prospective Google entry in the field, suspiciously recently described conceptually on the official Chromium OS site.

The information is so speculative as to be worthless other than as a general indicator of the direction that a Google tablet might take, but on the whole, having another major player in the market is no bad thing for businesses. On the other hand, I don't find Google's commitment to stability and support for enterprise products to be any more impressive than Apple's, so instead of potentially having a solution catered to their needs, CIOs faced with a Google tablet would find themselves down in the trenches fighting to get ahead of consumer technology creeping into the business.

The question then becomes, would consumers find advantages in a Chrome-based tablet over the iPad? A recent post from Todd Bishop at TechFlash describing his perspectives on Android versus his iPhone might be instructive.

The Droid feels like a good mobile phone that has been given a bigger screen, and randomly injected with great features. The iPhone feels like a well-thought-out, multipurpose Internet communications and entertainment companion that, oh, by the way, happens to let you make calls, too.

This dynamic might well transfer to the Google pad, as well. While the iPad is a stylistic exercise in providing a multipurpose, lightweight computing utility device (for lack of a better term), the Google pad may prove to be a more computer-like device that is more open, less carefully designed, but more intentionally oriented to PC-like tasks. That could be a boon for business users. The variation sure to be available in hardware platforms is also an advantage for enterprise users, as TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid points out. More diverse manufacturers will lead to different price points and feature sets, just as has happened with Android phones, making it more likely that business users will find a combination that is particularly well-suited to their specific needs.