Collaborate, consume and create – these are the driving pillars of today’s workplace. As the workplace evolves, so does the evolution of technology. While smartphones have been in work environments for a few years now, tablets are just beginning to enter the enterprise and research is highlighting that they are complementary technologies to laptops and desktops.
In February 2011, Dell and Intel commissioned Forrester Consulting to leverage its Forrsights Workforce Employee survey along with supplemental customer survey analysis to determine IT decision-makers adoption plans for tablets in the enterprise. Forrester discovered that notebooks, desktops and smartphones were found to be “must-have” devices, while tablets, slates, and netbooks were “nice-to-have” technologies (see chart below).
PCs and Smartphones are “Must-Have Devices for information workers, while Tablets and Netbooks are “Nice-to-Have”
“If you had your choice of two work devices that would make you most productive in your job, which two devices would you prefer to have?”
Tablets can bring new benefits to a work environment, such as increased productivity, flexibility and mobility, but they also bring with them security and management challenges. They can replace paper-based systems and introduce new productivity places, but this only makes them a companion device, not a replacement for existing PCs. Tablets bring with them new complexities, and add another layer of challenges for IT managers who are faced with embracing a steep consumerization curve in the enterprise.
The number of mobile devices and new configurations that IT is expected to support will inevitably rise at staggering percentages over the next two years, putting immense pressure on IT managers to support a heterogeneous client environment. As part of this study, Forrester found that 58% of IT professionals stated that the growth in the number of devices and configurations to support and the cost of deployment were their biggest concerns with supporting and managing tablets in the enterprise.
In the Virtual Era, where we are starting to see the blurring of the lines between personal and professional, it’s evident that tablets continue to enter the workplace. In fact in industries such as healthcare, retail or hospitality, tablets are opening new doors for opportunity. For instance, we can save doctors and nurses’ time and resources as they update a patient’s records in real time. Or a manufacturer can easily walk around the manufacturing plant, getting up to the minute stats regarding its supply chain.
However, in a market where strategies are constantly evolving, in an ecosystem that has yet to mature, the one thing we can bet on is this: the PC is not dead.