As we dive into the New Year, a myriad of IT trends are unfolding — from Amazon’s success with the Kindle Fire, to Facebook’s expected IPO and RIM’s ongoing business challenges — that make it easy to be distracted. But from a macro viewpoint, there are only two key metrics that require your laser focus: keeping pace with technology and staying relevant in your market. Everything else is background noise.

That’s not to say you and your staff should ignore the astounding rate at which iPhones and Androids are entering your workplace. And you should clearly be concerned about the recent security breaches affecting 24 million Zappos customers.

On a daily basis, however, you — like CIO Larry Bonfante — are probably finding ways to incorporate mobile devices and social media into your enterprise and moving back-end systems to the cloud. At the end of the day, as Larry writes, you aren’t just buying technology, you must answer the question: “What matters to our clients and consumers?” (You can re-read Larry’s Smart Enterprise Exchange blogs for other tips on IT leadership here.)

Nowhere is the customer more of a No. 1 priority than in the retail industry — and that mandate is only growing stronger. At the National Retail Federation’s annual conference in January, several speakers addressed ways that social media, business intelligence and mobile devices will make or break retailers in the coming year — and it’s not just CIOs who are involved in these strategies. DSW’s Harris Mustafa, EVP Supply Chain and Merchandise Planning and Allocation, spoke about smart ways to leverage customer data and mobile technologies, as did several CMOs, brand managers and CTOs. Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru looked back and ahead at key retail IT trends.

We want to help you stay focused, too, and are offering expert advice on decision making this month and next on Smart Enterprise Exchange. In addition to Pete DeLisi’s thoughtful comments about decision making in the age of speed, book author and Babson Professor Tom Davenport will provide community members with a preview of his upcoming book, Judgment Calls, next month. Tom and co-author Brook Manville discuss organizations that have successfully tapped the diverse and deep knowledge of their people — often using collaborative technologies — to build an organizational decision-making capability.

We also feature an insightful Q&A with Randy Gaboriault, CIO at Christiana Care Health System — another industry sector where IT is making dramatic changes to everyday business. In recognition of this important sector, we've added a Healthcare common interest group to the Smart Enterprise Exchange. Please join it and post discussions, comments and ideas to share with other like-minded IT executives.

How is your business staying relevant in its market and using technology for customer satisfaction? Join the conversation and share your wins and thoughts with your peers on the Exchange.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

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.