Tablets On the Rise!
In The 2020 Workplace book, we predicted a rise in corporate apps as employees request business apps as a way to increase their productivity at work. With more than 500,000 apps in iTunes, Gartner’s new research points to apps being used across the enterprise.
As of November 2011, according to a recent press release by Gartner Inc., sales of media tablets in 2011 increased 261% to 63.6 million units and it is predicted that by 2016 more than 900 million tablets will be in the hands of users.
Executives and leaders are bringing tablets into the workplace — and in many cases are preferring them to the traditional PCs for client-facing meetings, distributing marketing materials, configuration tools and more.
According to Gartner, the top 10 business applications for tablets include:
- Sales: Automation systems for customer collateral, sales presentations, and ordering systems.
- Business Data: Intelligence, analytical and performance applications with management dashboards.
- Email: Containerised email to separate corporate messaging environments from personal email.
- Collaboration Tools: Applications for meetings and events.
- Files and Utilities: Sharing and document distribution.
- Business Processes: General corporate/government enterprise applications for CRM, ERP, SCM and messaging.
- Healthcare: Medical support systems for doctors, nurses, and physical therapists.
- Virtualization: Hosted virtual desktop agents to provide secure remote operations of traditional desktop applications and environments.
- Social Networking: Applications with intelligent business insight.
- Documentation: Board books for secure document and report distribution.
Are You Ready?
This leads us to three questions for you:
- What are your company’s top 10 business applications for media tablets?
- What are the top 10 apps for HR?
- What processes have changed because of the surge of popularity of media tablets in the workplace?
Share below what your organization is doing to adapt tablets and apps in the workplace and we will write a follow-up post on this.
Also, if you want to explore how organizations are redefining learning using a mix of internal corporate social networks and media tablets, be sure to check out our upcoming Social Learning Boot Camp, March 19-20, at IESE Business School in New York. The boot camp will highlight various corporate uses of the iPad 2, as well as examine the benefits and barriers for using mobile devices and corporate social networks for learning. Case studies from several companies will be shared. Plus, participants get an iPad 2! Learn more …
