FOUR QUESTIONS ON THE FUTURE OF TABLETS

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Submitted by Terri Griffith on Mon, 05/07/2012 - 07:07
I'm headed to InterOp to talk about tablets. Michael Dortch is leading a panel including Tom Henderson, Maribel Lopez, and me. Our goal is to raise key issues around the massive growth of tablets in organizations, and what to do as this trend continues. Michael posed four prep questions and I'm providing the drafts of my answers below. I'll follow up with the key features of the audience discussion later in the week.
  1. What is the most important single thing business decision makers need to address when considering or pursuing support of tablets at their companies?

    2. How quickly to weave together their people's knowledge, skills, and abilities; technology tools; and organizational practices. This is a money and focus question and should not be done in an ad hoc manner. General strategies about how to do this mixing is at the heart of my book, The Plugged-In Manager, and I only wish I'd foreseen the explosion in tablets so I could have explicitly covered it there.

  2. What is the most important single thing technology decision makers need to address when considering or pursuing support of tablets at their companies?

    3. BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) - The consumerization of workplace computing isn't limited to mobile phone and laptops.

    We're bringing all of our technology to work. Tablets, like mobile phones, become extensions of our capabilities and either the organizational device needs to sync seamlessly to the personal device or they need to be one and the same.

  3. What is the most important single thing tablet technology vendors can or should do (or NOT do) when attempting to promote their products to business technology buyers and users?

    4. Two things: Don't put walls around the garden and avoid any design decisions that limit the possibility of off-line productivity. Google, this means we need off-line doc editing back now!

  4. What is the single most important near-term future development for which everyone in our audience should begin preparing NOW?

    5. Requests for all work to be tablet-friendly. The people in this room have been working from anywhere and have used their technical skills to find creative ways to generally be connected. Tablets give this capability to the rest of the organization who may not have that war driving culture and ability to be always on. Legacy systems that get in the way of a tablet mode of work will be challenged.

Those are my thoughts around Michael's questions. We are leaving a fair amount of time for discussion. Anything we should be prepared for?