Analyst firm Ovum (News - Alert) has put out a very interesting new report, “Challenges and Best Practices for Deploying Tablets in the Enterprise,” which clearly underscores that tablets are becoming the major new force in enterprise workforce technology. The report finds that tablets are in fact becoming quite prevalent in all workplace environments - which we all know to be inherently true. However, it’s extremely useful having research to underline that the trend is indeed real.
This now clearly delineated trend strongly suggests that enterprises need to evaluate their tablet scenarios. For companies that find they are either denying the use of tablets to their employees or wondering if they should have a tablet strategy in place or that find their workforces are under-represented in terms of being tablet-enabled: congratulations, you are now officially among the enterprise luddites! More seriously and more importantly, it clearly means that your competitors are rapidly gaining both strategic and tactical advantages over your own business.
Key among its findings, Ovum underscores that although tablets are not always direct replacements for inexpensive desktops or fully configured laptops, their capabilities absolutely provide opportunities for organizations to update and change their business processes. This point is critical to understanding why those companies that are moving to adopt tablets are likely to gain competitive advantages.
As we head into 2014, it is already a truism that mobility significantly refines and improves most business processes. For those enterprises that intelligently make the move to adopt tablets the improvements in business processes will deliver significant gains in productivity, workforce effectiveness and lower costs of doing business.
We need to highlight the word "intelligently" that we used in the last paragraph. It is the most necessary component of any enterprise tablet strategy. Ovum finds that as the market for tablets grows, their usage clearly contributes to a change in the way people work and that this is having a noticeable impact on the enterprise. Whether through corporate provisioning or BYOD, the fast increasing numbers of tablets are of course also being used to access corporate data and applications - intelligently managing tablet deployments is critical to successfully deploying them.
Richard Absalom, analyst for Consumer Impact Technology at Ovum and author of the report, notes, “Coupled with imaginative thinking around how mobile apps could provide new or improved processes in specific roles, tablet deployments have the potential to change the way that businesses operate. The primary challenge for the enterprise is to turn tablet usage into a genuinely transformative deployment, taking into account but not just reacting to demand from employees that are bringing their own tablet or want to be provided with one. ”
Ovum’s multi-market employee survey, conducted in Q2 2013, serves as the report's foundation. Key details include the following:
- 17.6 percent of employees have already been provided with a tablet by their employer, up from 12.5 percent in 2012.
- Of respondents that owned a personal tablet, 66.7 percent used that device at work. The number of personal tablet owners increased from 28.4 percent in 2012 to 44.5 percent in 2013.
- Given this growth, a fast increasing number of personally owned tablets are also being used at work.
Absalom offers the following advice in terms of best tablet deployment practices:
- The first step to a successful tablet deployment is to understand employee behavior and activity. Employees are using multiple devices to access corporate data and content, and any tablet or mobility strategy must be set in this context.
- Providing access to corporate data and applications must not come at the expense of data security, but it is also vital that a secure solution does not come at the expense of user experience. Doing so can ultimately be counterproductive as it turns users off from using the approved device or application and leads to them finding their own way of working – one of the primary drivers of BYOD in the first place.
- Whatever strategy an enterprise opts for, given the fast pace of change in the market and an environment where employees are using personally owned tablets regardless of their employer’s official IT policy, generating ROI ultimately depends on getting deployments up and running quickly and understanding what does and does not work.
There is absolutely no arguing with any of these points. Planning a well thought out strategy for deploying enterprise tablets is a game changing effort. Today is the day to get started on deploying yours!
Details on the full Ovum report, “Challenges and Best Practices for Deploying Tablets in the Enterprise,” are available directly on the website.
Edited by Alisen Downey