Tablets are immature when it comes to enterprise-level management, security and functionality, according to Paul DeBeasi, Research VP, Gartner.  At best, “tablets will augment, not replace, notebooks,” since tablets are “optimized for consumers of content, not creators of content,” he said at the recent New York Interop conference.

Chris Hazelton, Research Director, Mobile & Wireless at the 451 Group and ChangeWave Research, meanwhile, countered with August data showing that 16 percent of 1,618 corporations were providing tablets to employees — up from 4 percent in May 2010. In a market where IT spending is flat, that’s a significant amount, he said.

The debate over enterprise support of tablets and mobile devices continued on October 5, when the analysts squared off on the topic of whether your next notebook will be a tablet.

DeBeasi agreed that tablets are exciting and growing, and Gartner estimates that 300 million will be shipped by 2015. But tablet growth won’t be primarily in enterprises. The new paradigm, he said, will be a multidevice work model where users will select “the best device (smartphone, tablet, notebook) for the job.” The more important question is: “How do we synchronize our content and context among all of our devices?”

Additionally, DeBeasi said that technology is changing so rapidly that the endpoint devices of today, including tablets, phones and notebooks, won’t be the same in the future. “They are all morphing,” he said.

Hazelton agreed that the “form factors” may change, yet mobile apps are on the rise. At present, most business users employ tablets for checking email (70%), accessing the Internet (70%) and working away from the office (68%), but such uses as customer presentations (44%), sales support (43%) and tablets as replacements for laptops (36%), are gaining speed. Perhaps even more significantly, more than half of 505 businesses surveyed by ChangeWave in March said they will deploy two or more mobile apps in 2011.

While the debate attracted advocates on each side, to my mind, it’s not an either/or question-- each device will have a user base and each is optimal for a given application. Until device nirvana is reached—whatever form that may take-- the larger issue for enterprise IT is how to get through the interim period when multiple devices need support, service and funding. No one disagrees that short term management will be a challenge.

Read more about mobile device sessions at Interop here and more about Mobile-driven businesses here.

I love the Dilbert comic strips because they point out the humorous side of our daily business lives. They can be biting at times, and certainly they exaggerate enormously, but like a lot of humor they are funny because they often ring true.

IT has received its fair share of attention from Scott Adams, the creator of the strip, over the years and that seems to be stepping up recently as the disruption accelerates. In just the past week or two, for example, Dilbert’s world has poked fun at IT monitoring employee Web sites, the proliferation of passwords, and inattentive tech support. It’s good to laugh at these caricatures sometimes and see the light side of the bureaucracies we inadvertently create. At the same time, we should be careful that life doesn’t imitate art in this case — and that IT is solving business problems, not creating new ones.

Oddly, perhaps, I thought of Dilbert when I read a recent white paper published by Accenture’s prestigious Institute for High Performance, which raised a very serious question: Can Enterprise IT Survive the Meteor of Consumer Technology?

It’s an excellent position paper that lays forth several premises about the consumerization of IT — something we have all heard about and are experiencing daily. Fundamentally, Accenture says: “As consumer technologies become ever more powerful and useful, IT leaders face difficult questions about how to adapt. While definitive answers are elusive for now, they must be grappled with today if enterprise IT is not to be pushed completely to the sidelines in the next few years.”

I would include cloud computing along with the consumer technologies that line of businesses are adopting on their own, often circumventing traditional IT purchasing processes.

Accenture is not alone in considering these issues, of course. In a report late last year, McKinsey also concluded that “fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share, but [they] also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.” Smart Enterprise Exchange has featured companies that are implementing these practices, as well, such as Procter & Gamble’s e-commerce efforts, and Schumacher Group’s dive into mobile technologies this year.

Yet Accenture’s paper seems most significant to me because it focuses on the CIO and the IT department transformation that’s taking place. Its analysts pose very provocative and direct questions when they ask: “Is it inevitable that IT will become irrelevant over time? For that matter, is it possible that the CIO has already lost the control he was fighting so hard to keep?”

Smart Enterprise magazine and the Smart Enterprise Exchange community will be taking an in-depth look at these critical IT issues in the coming months. Specifically, how are collaborative and consumer platforms disrupting business and repositioning IT in the enterprise, and how can CIOs get ahead of the curve?

We will speak with CIOs at businesses such as Kaiser Permanente, CorePLUS and JetBlue Airways who are not only embracing consumer technologies in their global enterprises, but are finding ways to use them for competitive advantage, revenue-generation and customer satisfaction — exactly the IT topics that Dilbert and others have criticized in the past. Perhaps it is by seizing the opportunities new platforms represent that IT will not only maintain its relevance, but grow even more important to the enterprise.

In addition, we’ll highlight the results of two in-depth, global research studies that CA Technologies conducted with IDC. The first, with more than 1,000 consumer-tech user responses describes “the booming adoption of mobile and online/cloud technologies for personal and business use and consumers’ expectations of much higher usage going forward.” The second, surveyed more than 800 enterprise IT executives to get their perspective and strategies in light of the rapid pace of consumer tech usage. The key recommendations? Offer support and focus on automation, management and security. [See related article here.]

We also invite you to help lead our online discussion and offer your experiences, opinions and solutions foryour peers.You can begin by taking this poll and also by leaving a comment on this blog. You can also create a discussion thread on the site’s Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Group or on our Linked In group.

Paula  Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange