What's the Opportunity for ERP and iPad?

The opportunity for ERP vendors and IT managers is as follows: to use the iPad and iPhone system to double the number of satisfied users of enterprise applications.

Key points:

1. A large subset of corporate users have laptops and workstations but don’t use them to access enterprise applications. This “resistant user” group comprises on average 50% and in many industries as much as 80% of the potential user base in a given organization. They are the doctors, nurses, retail store managers, shift supervisors at factories, sales managers at insurance companies, and scientists in laboratories. You name an industry, we will find users who can’t easily access or properly maintain the enterprise applications that their IT departments have so painstakingly installed.

2. Why? Because the systems are too hard to use for busy executives…too many features, and the features are designed more for data entry or clerical employees. From a purely physical standpoint, our executive users are “semi mobile” – they walk around a lot, and carrying (or using) a 6-pound laptop with a clumsy keyboard entry process is simply not viable.

3. However these users WILL happily use the system if they are given a 1-pound tablet they can carry in place of a clipboard (a very friendly form factor) which does not have the problems of prior tablet computers, and which has been connected in an optimum fashion to the existing enterprise application (not reproducing the poorly designed interfaces, but creating an entirely new, more human friendly and more agile interface, accessing the same database but with an interface optimized for the modern age). With this approach, you hit the “tipping point” of this user, and they jump on board with the enterprise software.

4. Is this easy or fast? Of course not. Is it worth is? Well, who wouldn’t like to double the number of effective users?