Trend 1: Tablet Computing Experiences Remarkable Growth
The Austin Convention Center (ACC) in Austin, Texas, looked
at tablets for several years, but “the learning curve for the maintenance folks
was too high with previous kinds,” says Joe Gonzalez, the ACC’s IT services
manager. However, with a floor plan that covers six city blocks, a lot of time
and labor was lost accessing paperwork, so management realized that tablet PCs
would be a worthwhile investment.
At the ACC, FileMaker was already the back-office
application, and the vendor’s FileMaker Go product allowed the center to go
mobile. This enabled the center to put all show and booth paperwork directly in
the hands of each maintenance worker, sharply reducing trips to the central
service desk—trips that take an average of 10 minutes.
“We gave our maintenance service workers 10 minutes of
training and off they went,” Gonzalez recalls. He estimates that, from an
investment in 15 tablets, the ACC is saving $50,000 to $60,000 a year “just in
labor, just on the show floor.” The ACC expects to have 75 tablets by the end
of 2012.
This is this kind of adoption curve that, when multiplied by
the millions, has made tablet computing the top business technology trend for
2012. Half of midsize and larger organizations expect to increase their
investments in tablets at least moderately—significantly more than any other
technology we asked about in our survey. (See the top four technologies in
chart 1 above.) That’s remarkable growth for a technology that’s less than two
years old in its current form. (The first tablets, introduced a decade ago,
never took off.)
For more, read Baseline's Top 10 Business Trends of 2012.
Innovation 
