The next generation of network-edge device has been, perhaps forever, (mis)labeled as “wearable” tech. As labels go, that’s as accurate but irrelevant as “cellular” phone (only an engineer needs to know what that adjective means) or “fluorescent” light (ditto). These terms of novelty give no hint of the benefits that would make a user care, or a business invest — but those benefits are many, not merely prospectively but in ways that are measurable today.

Enterprises should look beyond the label to see the new leverage that’s at hand to improve productivity in every workplace: Opportunities for context awareness, data fusion and improved integration of the physical and the digital worlds in domains that range from the conference room to the oil patch.

In the field, someone looking at a physical object like a malfunctioning valve can immediately be assisted with augmented-reality data. A QR code on that valve, for example, could trigger a superimposed description of what that valve is controlling. Location awareness could prevent an action elsewhere in a process plant from endangering a worker who might be affected in another part of the facility.

In a factory, updates on process speed and quality can be brought to an operator’s or supervisor’s attention without taking hands off work in progress. In a meeting, a participant will be able to check a fact or note a new input — with barely a noticeable loss of eye contact — and quickly share what might be useful, with a gesture that puts that information where others can see it, as well.

This is not a time for leisurely study and gradual introduction. New devices enter the workplace more rapidly in every successive wave of connection, miniaturization and on-board analytic sophistication. It took the landline telephone 73 years to go from 10 percent to 90 percent market penetration; the PC did it in 30 years, and the smartphone and tablet are on track to make that same climb in less than eight. Keep pace with this acceleration, or your workplace may look as out of date in 2020 as a factory would look today with people balancing a laptop computer in one hand while holding a wrench with the other.

At the same time, try to shed the mental baggage of the “wearable” label, which can limit a person’s thinking in the same way as a label like “portable computer” or “cordless phone” or “horseless carriage.” Each of these labels once described something that was functionally familiar, and that people employed to do familiar things while enjoying one notable improvement — but a wearable device is not just a “lapless laptop,” any more than an iPhone is merely “keyboardless,” or a multispectral camera merely “filmless.” Incremental thinking does not change the world.

We should instead define the opportunity not as repackaging the tasks that our digital tools perform now, but as a list of device behaviors that would increase our productivity at work and our convenience in daily life. Those requirements should drive the form. New connectivity, new miniaturization, new power sources can all play a part — and if we wind up with something that used to be the size of a brick that now can readily go on a wrist or fit into a pendant or an eyeset, that’s fine. But let’s see if we can make that an outcome of utility, instead of designing a gadget from something we saw in “Dick Tracy” or on “Star Trek,” and then asking what it’s good for.

The first thing we should demand from our next-generation personal device is awareness of context: That it be location-aware, motion-aware and environment-aware, where each of us has an “environment” that includes who is with us, what else is happening near us, and what resources are available to us.

Traditional digi-device form factors, like desktop and laptop and even tablet, don’t reliably move with us: They’re on a desk while we’re in a meeting room, or in the trunk while we’re driving, and they’re generally unaware of anything except (at most) their own location. Hardly anything in use today can automatically adjust its manner of delivering information based on location, velocity, acceleration and nearby available technology — we don’t expect traditional devices to adapt, without our attention and tedious system administration, to our being stationary versus moving, alone versus in a meeting, limited to a built-in screen versus being in a room that has an entire wall of displays. Improvements to this continuity of experience are already on their way.

The second thing we should demand from devices is seamless connection — that they be always on, autonomously discovering, discreetly advising and proactively assisting. This second set of capabilities is further advanced, although right now that’s a mixed blessing: Anyone who bothers to look will find abundant examples of devices that are much too easy to discover, and many others that offer advice that may confuse or mislead. There’s a lot of engineering to be done at the level of identity, privilege and auditability management — not only at the level of the network, but also within devices themselves.

The good news is that most of the value to be added here will not need to be on-board in the personal device, which will reduce the “early adopter tax” by letting even first-wave devices get significantly smarter over time. We’ll also see Metcalfe’s-law effects: As the density of devices in a region goes up, their ability to combine various measurements of what’s happening can make all of the cooperating users better off.

The third transformation will be augmenting our real-world activities, rather than competing with them. In manufacturing, field service, public safety and national defense, there will be needle-moving improvements in performance (including, in many cases, substantial reduction of costs).

‘Wearable” is not an engaging label, especially to anyone under 25. The Beloit College “Mindset List” for faculty welcoming the class of 2014 included the warning, “They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.” As tag lines go, “Now you can wear it!” may be less than compelling.

Don’t get too focused, therefore, on how you’ll wear it. Imagine what would make you feel undressed without it — and then, make it so.

Peter Coffee is VP for Strategic Research at Salesforce.com, where he serves as a liaison with the IT and business community to define the opportunity and clarify customers’ requirements on the company’s evolving Salesforce1 Platform. Reach him @petercoffee.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Don’t look now, but the smartphone is now the “first screen.”

Actually, you probably are looking now: IDC research shows that 80 percent of smartphone users check their phones within 15 minutes of waking up, and 79 percent of smartphone users have their phone on or near them for all but two hours of their waking day.

For the first time since such things began to be measured, says research from Millward Brown, people are spending more time with their smartphones than they spend watching TV.

Consumer entertainment already reflects this reality: For example, Fox Broadcasting engages viewers of popular TV series with added mobile content, with Twitter as another channel for active interaction.

The question is, when will business application designers start to treat the smartphone as the primary device for Getting Stuff Done? When will user experiences be crafted for the person who is running a career, or even running a company from their phone?

It’s long past time to get over the novelty of a full-function Web browser in one’s pocket. Using a browser on a small-screen device is a last resort for mobile-intensive users, whose total Web-access time while mobile is approaching three hours per day — but only 22 minutes, on average, are spent in the mobile browser, according to research by Flurry.

What people clearly prefer is the crafted user experience, appropriate to context and form factor, of a mobile app that turns cloud-resident resources into relevant information and straightforward options for action.

That’s why it borders on perverse to see legacy IT providers laboring to bring the 1980s model of so-called “productivity software” to the mobile device: Inviting users to author documents on a downsized desktop, when their device should be serving as a window into a real-time interactive world (both inside and outside a company).

Consider the environment in which 1980s-style “office suites” of word processor, spreadsheet and database were born and became the norm. Connectivity was episodic and limited: A matter of “dialing up” a low-bandwidth Internet connection, for periods of a few pay-per-use minutes at a time, and exchanging documents in what can only be charitably called a batch-mode interaction.

This was never desirable, but in the connection-poor environment of the late 20th century, it was a necessary compromise.

When we’re always connected, “normal” behavior changes. In any real-world collaboration, would one person sit across a table from another taking notes while the other person talks for 10 or 15 minutes? And then say, “Give me a moment …” and author a point-by-point document in reply, to hand across the table minutes or hours later?

Nor does it make any sense, in the continuously connected environment of today’s mobile user, to be lobbing multi-paragraph documents back and forth instead of engaging in conversation.

These conversations, increasingly, involve not only people — but also connected resources and devices. It’s dangerously old-school to wait for a person to read a report, notice a problem, and send out a call for help, when a data-driven trigger can set off a programmed workflow that engages appropriate resources immediately.

This is not an aesthetic difference, not merely a sop to “digital native” Millennials. In a world of legacy laptops, carrying a “desktop metaphor” into the field, a sales rep might sit across from a customer making notes on desired changes to a contract — then end a meeting, go to a car, get onto a VPN via wireless hotspot, and start a one- or two-day process of response.

In a modern world of conversation and collaboration, the desired options are interactively explored and priced before the meeting ends; the contract is signed with a fingertip on the glass; and when the sales rep heads for the car, it’s to start the engine and go on to the next deal.

No company should underestimate the impact of this change in the pace and dynamics of customer interaction.

For the person at the top of the org chart, this mobile-optimized model is the difference between trusting that org chart’s labeled boxes or actually knowing who is getting things done — because now it’s possible to have real-time metrics of interaction and effect.

Running a company from a phone is not a statement about technology, but an opportunity for new and far more vigorous and rewarding behavior: Enabled by technology, to be sure, but not an automatic outcome of technology adoption.

The smartphone is a window, not a desk, but the manager still needs to look through it and act on what can now be seen.

“Run the business on your smartphone” is not a Stupid Technology Trick, nor is it a compromise in which speed is allowed to overshadow completeness. It’s both a faster model and a more complete model, in which the technology truly disappears into its function of connection — and people can focus much less on the complexities of using a PC (and occasionally even “getting online”) to put that energy into Getting Stuff Done.

Peter Coffee is VP for strategic research at Salesforce.com, where he serves as a liaison with the IT and business community to define the opportunity and clarify customers’ requirements on the company’s evolving Salesforce1 platform. He is the author of two books, “How To Program Java” and “Peter Coffee Teaches PCs.” Reach him @petercoffee.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.