You don’t have to be a road warrior – or even assigned to a classic “rugged” work environment – to benefit from rugged tablets’ incomparable mobility experience.
You just have to be someone who appreciates the extreme power, flexibility, and connectivity of a complete PC experience in a condensed, yet big screen, mobile form factor that can be managed in one hand (while on foot) or double as a desktop. If you’re prone to dropping your laptop or mobile device or guilty of fluid spills and splashes on your screen, then the highly rated protection of rugged tablets is a can’t-beat bonus not offered by commercial grade mobile devices. Plus, if you’re someone who ever works outside - or wants to have the flexibility to do so – rugged tablets’ sunlight readable display makes it easy to check email, review documents, and remain responsive to colleagues and customers at all times.
In fact, many state, local, and even federal government workers don’t think to consider rugged tablets when making mobile device selections for their departments, especially if they tend to logon more often from a desk than in dusty, rainy, snowy, or sunshine-laden job sites. But what’s important to remember when shopping for any new mobile or computing technology – whether it will be used by a procurement director, public school educator, or high-ranking agency supervisor – is that it’s rare for anyone to remain stationary or indoors for eight hours anymore. Contracting officers have to conduct site visits on occasion. Teachers are frequently moving between classrooms and even campuses. Supervisors are constantly off-site for meetings and inspections of active projects. In fact, every major federal agency “performs work that requires employees to function outside of an office on occasion,” FedTech Magazine confirmed recently.
While some public sector agencies may try to support a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy to keep things “simple,” the security considerations, OS and application compatibility issues, and general oversight of multiple devices and data management systems are far from simple for IT. In fact, BYOD just opens up a brand new can of worms that the government sector – given its transparency and documentation requirements – will struggle to control. Even if emerging guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) assist with security hurdles and you’re able to establish onboarding processes that provide native application functionality to every single mobile device on the market, do the costs of developing, implementing, and maintaining such an intricate and multi-layered BYOD program really add up to a “winning” number? Probably not, especially when compared to the cost of purchasing, onboarding, and managing agency-issued rugged tablet PCs that can support all department functions from all possible job locations. Rugged tablets are unique in their OS flexibility, back-office integration capabilities, ease of use functionality, and long-term expandability of critical workflows. Plus, they’re completely secure and truly mobile.
Even in military “office” environments, there is constant turnover of both military members and civilians serving in specific jobs. It’s not uncommon to hear of frequent team restructuring – and physical shifts to new desk locations – to accommodate for personnel loss or gains due to deployments or PCS. Yet it is common to hear about disruptions in productivity during these periods of change simply because people have to wait for IT to come move their assigned desktop computer to the right location or provide new authorization for access to a different computer to even access share drives. It’s not as simple as literally unplugging and re-plugging in the computer as needed – but it could be if they transitioned to mobile desktop solutions such as rugged tablets that offer the same multi-level authentication capabilities, processing power, and workflow connectivity as traditional desktops. Think of the man hours and increased productivity that could be recovered and the customer service improvements that could be made by minimizing such unnecessary yet frequent downtime using rugged tablet-based systems.
Rugged tablets travel well too, even if it just needs to be carried a couple of blocks from the office to the courthouse – or on boat during waterway inspections. Secure in-vehicle docking options can even be customized to accommodate the unique mounting requirements of multiple government vehicle models and non-traditional modes of transportation.
The in-office and in-vehicle benefits of rugged tablet mobility aren’t exclusive to federal government or military agencies, though. The real-time data access, impeccable connectivity, and full-screen view of important forms and documents make it easy for agencies of all sizes to improve employee productivity, customer service, and efficiency rates across the entire organization. The field-proven MIL-STD-810G certifications, IP ratings, and CID2/CIZ2/ATEX compliance provide full confidence in their genuine rugged fitness for use in extreme environments. And the low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) makes rugged tablets a financially accessible and easily applicable computing solution for multiple areas of government responsibility: