iPad's Success Demands IT Change Its Thinking

More importantly, IT must adjust its thinking about the most vital interface is for internal applications. For more than a decade, it has been the PC with perhaps an Internet interface. Going forward, it needs to be an Internet interface, possibly with a smartphone and iPad app. Client-based, corporate PC interfaces will be one of the casualties of this shift from PCs, with the exception of dedicated production applications, such as the general ledger for the finance team or a call center support application.

If you're looking for leaders in this effort, look at government agencies, especially in the United States, which have been quite agile in delivering their reference works, for everything from the state legal code to driving rules and regulations, on iPad applications in the iTunes store. The corporate sector is trailing the government in this adoption. How many of your companies have their HR policies and procedures in an iPad application that can be downloaded? Or a smartphone app to handle your corporate travel expenses? Does your front office application let customer-facing personnel be as mobile and productive as an Apple retail employee?

IT will have to build the software distribution infrastructure to let employees download or "pull" these applications and get new versions. That means configuring your own corporate version of an iTunes store, to let people self-provision and download apps to their devices, just as they download Angry Birds today. An in-house app store will provide a better experience for the corporate user at reduced cost. Forward-thinking infrastructure managers today are thinking about how to extend this app store infrastructure and approach to all their devices. It's just another example of an approach developed for the consumer market that's driving expectations in the business market.

As for those desktop PCs, where will they be in two to three years? They will still be used by production workers such as call center and back office personnel, but they will be more than likely virtualized, so the heavy computing is done in the data center and not the PC. And desktop PCs will be a much smaller proportion of overall client devices. This will have significant implications on your client software licenses (e.g. Windows and Office), and you should begin considering now how to adjust your contracts to handle this changing situation.

Just beyond those two or three years, it's possible that we'll consider traditional desktops the same way we think of floppy drives today--an odd bit of technology from the past.

Jim Ditmore, the former CIO of Barclays Global Retail Bank, has worked in IT for more than 25 years and as a CIO or CTO for the last 15 years. You can read more about Jims views on IT at Recipes for IT. Email encryption, rights management, email gateways and full-on data loss prevention systems can keep corporate data secure. Consider the pros and cons of each to determine what's best for your business. Download our Email And Data Loss report. (Free registration required.)