re: iPad's Success Demands IT Change Its Thinking
Bob,
I was trying for the style to be challenging not condescending. Good callout, I will try ensure it does not drift into being condescending in the future. Probably a little too much help from the editors.
On the knowledge workers, I am not saying they are the most important but they are the next major group that will shift that will enable critical mass on tablet and mobile applications in the workplace. I think you can divide up the workforce into 5 groups: those who are interfacing with the customer (front office) such as everyone from a financial advisor to a retail store employee to a salesman; those whose work requires mobile physical presence ( mobile worker) such as claims adjuster, construction manager, mechanic, driver, etc; those who handle production tasks in a controlled environment (back office) such as check processing, claims handling, medical review, accounting; those who are managers, analysts, administrators (knowledge workers) and I would split out developers, IT engineers, CAD/CAM, medical research, etc as a separate group (let's call them deep knowledge workers). There may be other categories but I think this covers most.
The mobile workers are already (and for some time) are moving to either specialized handheld units or to tablets. The Apple retail store shows how you can equip front office staff with tablets or smaller touch devices and make them really effective. And when the knowledge workers shift as well (and I see this in the corporate environment - it is like when blackberries cam in 15 years ago, everyone wants one, and they use it for most of their daily work) you now have critical mass. deep knowledge works and back office will continue to be the mainstay of the PC world for the next 3 to 5 years. I think the deep knowledge workers will transition when you have a great device that has good docking capability with almost no feature loss to a dedicated PC. So, knowledge workers are not the biggest, but they are not a niche, and they will swing the focus from PCs-Internet to tablets/mobile-Internet for corporate applications.
Is that any more compelling?
Thanks, Jim
User Rank: Apprentice
2/20/2012 | 10:54:44 PM
I think the next step is eliminating the client side script and utility distinctions between mobile and desktop browsers/apps. As soon as software developers stop writing client side JavaScript, disparate HTML/rendering layers, and using proprietary client side tools (Flash), we can get to the point where, for the most part, a browser is a browser, regardless of underlying OS, hw spec requirements, etc. From that stage, applications can be served without having a mobile version and a Windows desktop version. When users can pull their provisioned data/apps off of the server to any number of devices without application rewrites, IT will be able shift with minimal effort to whatever client side device comes along next. The less development on the client side, the better for client side flexibility. I don't really care if it is iPad or not, but it is going to be something other than only Windows and RIM.