In the 2010s, tablets were all the rage, prompting widespread adoption and adaption of mobile applications by public safety software vendors across both iOS and Android platforms.
While the pomp and circumstance for tablets has mostly subsided over the last decade, on occasion, we at GUARDIAN RFID will get asked, “Will Command Cloud ever support tablets for officers?”
The answer is, likely not.
In this blog, we’re going to cover:
- Why GUARDIAN RFID specifically chose not to support tablets
- How we arrived at this decision
- What would need to change for us to support tablets in Command Cloud
Why Has GUARDIAN RFID Specifically Chosen Not to Support Tablets?
Steve Jobs once explained how easy it is to jump on new and exciting technology vectors, but how hard it is to know which ones will provide long-term sustaining value. In fact, it’s much harder to say “no” than it is to say “yes.” As a technology company, if you get this wrong, the opportunity cost can be tremendous.
It’s really difficult to stay disciplined, especially when you feel a whole market is going one direction, and you intentionally choose not to follow. Conversely, it’s also hard to know if you’re too early embracing new, leading-edge technology few have heard of – and even fewer have deployed in a production environment. Being early isn’t necessarily the scary part, but it’s the fear of answering the question: Are we solving a problem with a unique technology, or did we just adopt a unique technology in search of a problem?
GUARDIAN RFID has long rejected tablets in its ecosystem of hardware and software for one simple reason: they’re too large to be useful to front-line officers.
The last thing any correctional officer wants is for already limited real estate on their duty belts to be occupied by tools of luxury or marginal value, let alone their hands. In an ideal world, correctional officers’ hands are empty most of the time. And when they are holding an asset, it’s intermittent, strategic, and limited to one hand – never or rarely two.
Even those correctional officers with the largest, burliest man hands will never use a tablet with one hand. And for women, they’re more likely to chop down a tree with one hand than ever use one hand with a tablet. So, the form factor itself, simply due to sheer size, is a major disadvantage to staff.
A second reason GUARDIAN RFID has never supported tablets is their durability.
Yes, you can get third party cases to protect tablets. But for most front-line workers who need both hands more than 75% of the time to maximize productivity and effectiveness, a tablet will be dropped and damaged or broken – resulting in a merry-go-round of continual repairs and replacement costs – frustrating staff and those in finance.
When you think about frontline workers, such as correctional officers, their responsibilities cannot be conducted remotely. They are 98.9% present all the time on the floor, walking the halls, or in a pod. Only 1.1% of the time are they seated behind a desk.
VDC Research analysts performed a study that found frontline workers lose an average of 54 minutes of productivity each time they must charge their tablet. When the battery reaches the end of its life after a year or so, the device – and worker – may be offline for a couple of days or weeks since the tablet will have to be sent to a service depot for battery replacement service or information delays.
And when technology disrupts your staff, caused by issues such as devices dropping or breaking, a study by University of California Irvine found it takes an average of 23 minutes for employees to refocus on their tasks.
How Did GUARDIAN RFID Arrive at This Decision?
Honestly, it was simple to say “no” to tablets because we had had over a decade of mobility experience by the time tablets came to market. Saying no was attributable to how often we got pushback from correctional officers holding a ruggedized personal digital assistant (PDA) in the mid-2000s, which were a precursor to today’s rugged Android devices that still resemble the size and shape of a smartphone.
It's easy to forget that rugged smartphones have been on the market for less than 10 years. We brought the first rugged-grade Android device to market, SPARTAN, in 2017.
So, had it not been the experience of working with a variety of industrial PDAs in the mid-2000s and early 2010s, we might’ve agreed to supporting tablets.
However, the same questions would’ve always remained:
- What does a tablet do for an officer that a rugged mobile device can’t?
- Does a frontline officer benefit from or need the expanded screen size?
- Is that amount of screen real estate necessary?
- Do they perform better with larger visibility?
In the end, we didn’t believe so.
What Would Need to Change For Us to Support Tablets in Command Cloud?
The biggest change GUARDIAN RFID would need to see to consider supporting tablets comes from one source: our Warrior user community. If they were clamoring for tablets and larger screens, we would hear it.
Truth be told, they have no interest in tablets. Their only interest is continually enhancing their mobility initiatives with more capable, durable devices that are priced right, easy to use, and easy to charge.
Mobility is here to stay. As we’ve always said, correctional officers never do their best work behind a desk.
What mobility may look like in the next decade may evolve, but what we’re certain of are three things that will never change:
- Correctional officers will always need to verify their proof of presence during rounds – and that rounds were performed at staggered, irregular intervals based on inmate classification.
- The ability to capture inmate activities and movements will always require correctional officer oversight – even if it’s not always done with a mobile device. It may be done with increasingly better technology based on what cameras can see, not necessarily on fixed or wearable auto-identification tools.
- Tablets are not part of the future.