I’m doing my best to track sizeable enterprise deployments of tablets. Here’s one I caught via Mashable/CNN:
United Airlines announced Tuesday that it is replacing its pilots’ flight decks with iPads.
Rather than carry around 38 pounds of operating manuals, charts and logbooks, the 11,000 pilots at United and Continental will use a pre-loaded iPad. United started distributing iPads to pilots earlier this month and plans to have devices to all pilots by the end of the year
via United Continental replacing pilot manuals with iPads – CNN.com.
Now that Lenovo have got into the market with a tablet marketed under the ThinkPad name, how many of these roll outs will start look a little near sighted? I would wager that many of these large IT departments are now wishing they had waited and gone for the tried and tested route.
The one benefit that the iPad offers is the cool factor. And the fact that everyone will be able to use them.
The key question here is about consumerisation of IT. These organisations will have had to make a lot of infrastructure/policy/tech changes to support their iPad roll-outs … are they likely to want to go backwards?
Another point: What’s tried and tested about the Lenovo tablet?
Indeed Ewan. And bad writing on my part. I meant to articulate the fact that the brand is the tried and tested rather than the explicit product. Sorry about that.
I read these articles about iPad roll outs and I do wonder if the infrastructure changes are worth it. If it was my department I would want to lock these iPad down so hard that apart from the manuals, there would of been little else the tablet could of been used for. But many other people have pointed out that I’m missing the point with that sort of thought. But then I would argue that the manuals don’t offer the function to browse videos or what have you.
I don’t know. To me this all seems as if they are trying too hard to integrate the iPad into their companies purely for the “cool” factor. I can’t believe that until the iPad came out there was no way to compile, and keep updated, all these flight manuals and what have you.
What of you lock down the actual app and store all data encrypted on the iPad? Then folk could use them as normal tablets?