Apple's iPad Will Come Into The Enterprise Through The Consumer Door. Again.

  by Ted Schadler

Apple just announced its media tablet (we coined these things mobile media tablets in 2005 in private client conversations and in print in 2007) amidst much excitement and surprisingly little secrecy. There wasn't much if anything in the announcement that the bloggers hadn't anticipated.

This product will appear in 60 days with WiFi and in 90 days unlocked with AT&T data plan for $629 and $29/month. It will catch on quickly as an employee-provisioned third device, particularly for Mobile Professionals, 28% of the workforce. IT will support it in many organizations. After all, it's just a big iPhone to them and already 20% of firms support them.

Most of the media coverage will discuss the impact on consumer markets. I'm going to talk about the impact on businesses and on information & knowledge management professionals, the IT executive responsible for making the workforce successful with technology.

Make no mistake, this is an attractive business tool. Laptops will be left at home.

One thing's for sure, Apple knows how to time the market. And the market it's timed this time around is an important one: information workers self-provisioning what they need rather than what their employers provide. We have called this trend Technology Populism(AKA consumerization of IT), and it's important enough that we're writing a book called Groundswell Heroes about how to harness it.

Apple also timed the rest of it right. The technology, the media industry, the digital experience, the developer ecosystem, the retail presence, the applications, the operating system, the increasingly HTML5-enabled Web, the price, and the wireless industry is ready for this product.

Oh, I'm sure it will have problems. Despite the claims, battery life's sure to be inadequate for someone on the go all day, for example. But the iPad extends all the things that Apple's already got up and running. And Apple has addressed the usual problems already: cost, availability, accessories, wireless access.

And it offers some superior characteristics for the things that Mobile Professionals care about. Mobile Professionals are one of the four Workforce Personas we've defined. This segment is 28% of the US information workforce defined by a high need for mobility and a lot of applications. Mobile Professionals care about:

• Messaging and collaboration on the go. (Need email, calendar, contacts, Web conferencing.)
• Full Web experience. (Big screen, big Web pages. Duh.)
• Business media. (The New York Times app is just the beginning).)
• Full-size document tools. (Execs review, tweak, and present a lot on the go.)
• Secure wireless connectivity. (Any time, any place. This one needs work.)
• And let's not forget, looking cool. (Haven't seen it yet, but it's sure looking good.)

This thing will take off among high net worth mobile pros. And IT should be okay with that, at least in non-regulated industries where the lack of application management and device control tools are not big issues. After all, iPad is really just a big iPhone.

And in April 2009, 17% of enterprises and 25% of SMBs supported iPhone and in September 2009,16% of US information workers used iPhones for work, even at the world's largest organizations.

Now, some "What it Means" (WIM) points:

 

WIM #1: The importance of great document tools just increased. Apple's support of iWorks on the iPad gives execs what they need to present on the road and leave the laptop at home. Microsoft should build best-in-class iPad software in the Office formats. (Or watch execs move key material to the iWorks formats.) Adobe should take responsibility for a great PDF reader. And these readers must also be great presentation tools.

 

WIM #2: The importance of application push just got greater. Apple should make this a priority in its v4 release of the software. (We expect to see the v4 release in July 2010.)

 

WIM #3: Google has even more need now to retain control over the Android experience so developers can target that platform with the same relative ease as they can target the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad market.

 

WIM #4: The market for device and application management just got more important. Apple, make the management APIs a key initiative to allow vendors like Good, Box Tone, and Sybase to solve that problem. (Device management vendors, feel free to comment below if you want to be included in the conversation.)

 

Comments?

Office 2010’s June Release: Time To Strategize (And Segment)

By Sheri McLeish

Last week, Microsoft disclosed that it expects Office 2010 and related products to be generally available to consumers at retail in June 2010. Office 2010 and related products will be available to business customers through volume licensing earlier in the first half of 2010. This launch confirmation means massive effort by the Redmond product teams to work through feedback from the public beta and ready the suite for launch.

For Information & Knowledge Management professionals, it means there’s still plenty of time to plan and refine your Microsoft Office enterprise strategy. Office is a big line item for most companies – an expense that often comes into question the closer it gets to renewal time. I’ve spoken with firms that are weeks away from their license expiring and others that have calculated the ROI for their Office investment six years out. In all of these discussions clients want to get the best value and tools for their information workers.

So what are the best practices for developing your Office strategy? First off, get to know what your information workers do all day. Most all I&KM pros acknowledge that Office is standard operating procedure for certain parts of the business: the number crunchers in finance using Excel won’t function without it. But recent Forrester data suggests that six of every 10 information workers don't need a full-featured word processor to get their job done. Gathering data about your workforce’s use of their tools will improve your negotiating position, help determine who in your organization needs a full productivity suite, and enable you to apply personas to segment your workforce.

But Office strategy isn’t all about license costs, or even usage. For many of the companies I’ve spoken with, there’s no will to disrupt the apple cart. Their calculations of the per user cost through volume licensing are attractive enough to forego the potential for business disruption and cultural upheaval of introducing an alternative productivity suite. For these enterprises, optimizing Office tools for efficiency and integration with collaboration and business processes become a more significant part of the Office strategy.

Microsoft has a lot riding on Office 2010. As it toiled on its fourteenth version of the world’s most popular knowledge worker toolset, the market dramatically changed: Cloud computing and SaaS have fueled Office alternatives like Google Apps and Zoho, while OpenOffice suites have reached a level of interoperability with Office to make them truly viable alternatives for many information workers. But Microsoft still has an ace up its sleeve: a majority of enterprises own SharePoint for content management. And that content is overwhelmingly created in Office apps. In this sense, the strategy for most companies is clear – and now the RSVP date is, too. No regrets.

Efficiency, Sustainability, And Digital Natives Accelerate Paper’s Path To Digital

  By Sheri McLeish

As people spend more time consuming information digitally at home and at work, reliance on paper continues to decrease. But how far are we across the Digital Divide? In 1975, George E. Pake, then head of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, predicted that in 1995 his office would be completely different: “There will be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button. I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy I’ll want in this world.”

Thirty-five years later Pake’s vision largely came true for iWorkers, who today toggle between laptops, smart phones, and other devices to create, consume, and manage information. But an interesting thing happened along the way. With the initial rise in popularity of email and the Internet in the late 1990s, there was actually a bump in paper usage, not a decrease. People printed out their emails, receipts for e-purchases, documents, presentations – you get the idea. In fact, the World Wildlife Fund reported that some 10,000 sheets of paper are used each year by the average office worker in Western industrialized countries.

The other challenge faced by businesses has been the explosion of content types. Firms today need to support and coordinate multiple inbound and outbound channels. For processes like customer onboarding, paper persists due to lack of integration or reliance on paper by customers, partners, and staff. Today only a quarter of enterprises report that 25-50% of their customers are fully paperless, according to a recent Forrester Information Capture survey. Eighty-seven percent of firms have, are in the process of, or are planning to implement or upgrade information capture technology in their companies. The No. 1 investment area? No surprise here: integrating with enterprise apps.

This ongoing effort to remove paper from processes is driven by good, solid business reasons: For each sheet of paper used there are costs for purchasing, storage, copying, printing, labor, postage, disposal, and recycling. The ROI for capture investments is one of the most straight-forward for a technology investment. Driven by cost savings, increased productivity, and improved access and retention of electronic documents, companies continue to invest steadily in information capture to support business processes like registration, invoicing, and contract management.

Most Content Now Born Digital
But there’s another other huge driver of paper reduction in the enterprise: the iWorker. I know I still have a few piles of paper lingering at the office and more at home, but I haven’t looked at that stuff in years. I use my smart phone for a shopping list; I seem to have a hard time locating pens because I so rarely use them.

And I’m not unique. Forrester believes that well over two-thirds of content created today originates digitally. Consider:

• In our Forrester Workforce Analysis Survey, Q2 2009, 79% responded that they use word processing tools, and 60% report using word processing daily.
• Spreadsheets have similar but slightly lower use, with about half of information workers using spreadsheets daily.
• From the same study iWorkers are shown to be pretty happy with word processing tools – 82% indicate high satisfaction

This high level of satisfaction and ongoing use of tools to work with content in digital form supports the notion that most of the content being handled by iWorkers today is in electronic formats. And this will accelerate as Millennials who were “born digital” make up greater proportions of the workforce.

It’s Getting Easier To Be Green
Paper reduction also fits into the Green mindset. Along with embracing digital authoring tools, iWorkers indicate a strong desire to reduce paper in the workplace (75% strongly agree) and recognize the benefits of digital content such as facilitating quicker distribution and ability to reuse content. Paper-based or whiteboard content from collaborative work sessions increasingly are moving to the digital realm. During a tour of EMC’s storage manufacturing facility last week several of the process efficiencies touted were tied to digitizing information collection, including a widescreen digital whiteboard on the shop floor to replicate a physical whiteboard and an application that provides electronic access to the state of components as they are being tested, a task that previously required the technicians to walk through the test rooms and write down the information to then be inputted.

Custom development to automate and digitize manual processes remains core to ongoing process improvement. But for more informal content development, eventually iWorkers will take for granted originating this content digitally. Today adoption of wikis and blogs is still nascent, with under 10% of information workers using these tools. But as collaborative environments become more accessible via Web-based platforms like the Google Wave, Novell’s Pulse, IBM/Lotus Live, and Microsoft’s SharePoint and Office 2010, it will become even easier to live fully in a digital world of content.

Holdouts Hindered By Real Hurdles
There will be exceptions to the digital rule, however. Content captured via paper forms or that isn’t well supported for electronic input, such as math formulas or diagrams, will persist until better user interfaces make even these uses obsolete on paper. Most iWorkers today are not provisioned a stylus and tablet PC, so doing a first pass on paper or on a whiteboard remains faster even if eventually these drawings need to be captured digitally.

And there will be other holdouts as well: In an interview with NPR earlier this year, one of our era’s most prolific novelists James Patterson admitted he does all of his writing in longhand before turning it over to an assistant to be typeset. But in college classrooms, often the best barometer for what’s to come, more and more professors are allowing laptops and electronic note taking tools to be used in class. And as we look even further ahead, consider that penmanship has taken a backseat to keyboarding in the elementary curriculum at many schools. So for the class of 2025, Forrester predicts that their offices may not be just sans paper, but without a pen too. I guess that puts me ahead of the curve.

What about you? Are you farther along the paperless trail at home or at work? What’s driving paper reduction in your firm? What’s holding you back?

Survey Your Workforce To Understand Their Technology Needs

by Ted Schadler

Go to a baseball game and look around. Do the fans all look like you? Do they want what you want or think how you think or feel the way you feel about stuff? Nope. Baseball fans are diverse, unique, different, special. They have only one thing in common: They like baseball.

It's the same at work. Your workforce is just as diverse, unique, different, special. They have only one thing in common: They work for the same organization.

It's a simple but profound observation: Most people aren't like you. You can't apply your own thinking or feeling to them. For example, they don't necessarily like technology. They might avoid technology because it scares or mystifies them. They could stick with what they know until someone forces them to switch.

Need proof? Half of all information workers are pessimistic about technology. Only 1 in 4 uses instant messaging. 62% aren't fully satisfied with their word processor.

On the other hand, the other half of information workers are optimistic about technology. And some employees are wildly enthusiastic about technology. They bring their own smartphones to work -- and use them to work from every location. They use social network sites for work. They spends hours each day in love with their work devices and tools.

But which employees are enthusiastic and which are reluctant users of technology? After all, they aren't all in one job function or business group. The list of questions goes on:

• How can you be sure your software licenses aren't money wasted?

• How can you make sure your training dollars will be well spent?

• How can you identify barriers to adoption -- before that new Office upgrade, employee portal, unified communications, collaboration, desktop virtualization, team site, social networking, video conferencing, mobile, whatever initiative stalls out?

• How can you improve satisfaction with workforce technology -- and with your IT services?
  

• How can you be sure that a new workforce technology will be successful?

You can improve your chances by getting a handle on who your employees are and what they expect and need from technology. But how? Use the same sophisticated market research techniques that Apple, P&G, and Barack Obama do. Just ask them.

We are announcing Workforce Technographics^TM, a new research methodology for analyzing what information workers need from technology. Our first Workforce Technographics^TM study is a survey of 2,000 information workers at US companies and organizations with more than 100 employees. We asked about technology adoption, use, and satisfaction. We analyzed the attitudes and behaviors of information workers. We identified barriers to success and found and sized laggard and enthusiast segments.

This study will give you a benchmark for information technology use and satisfaction among US workers. We will be publishing reports from this study over the next few weeks and months and also feature regular blog posts with a veritable how-to guide for using market research techniques, including online surveys, focus groups, segmentation, and persona development to analyze your own workforce.

Have experiences to share? Questions you'd like to see us answer? Topics of interest? Things that are plaguing current efforts? Just comment and ask. We may have answers already.