Another unexpected difference is that Hawthorn, into its first year of iPad use, still has not standardized on a suite of office software for mobile users. Instead, it's left that decision up to managers and users in the various sales regions. "I would have expected more pushback from our regional managers," Hilton says. "But it really hasn't been like that. People are just doing their own thing. We have 20% or less who are using some kind of office suite."

This is all new territory for users and IT alike, and another example from The Ottawa Hospital shows just how new. A nurse in the hospital's wound care unit became fed up with repeatedly changing patients' bandages, she would remove them when the doctor came to examine the wound, and then redress the wound afterwards, recalls Potter. At one point, a doctor asked her to remove a bandage and heard a word rarely used by nurses to physicians: "No." Instead, she asked him to look at the patient's electronic record on his iPad.

When he did, he found a series of high resolution photos, taken by the nurse on her iPad, that showed the dressing before it was changed; the wound laid bare; the wound after cleaning, and finally, the new dressing. For the first time, the physician didn't ask to have the dressing removed. In effect, the nurse created an "app" using nothing except the phone's features, and the back-end patient record application.

"We now have a [custom-written] photo wizard: you take a picture, the wizard pops up, and guides you to uploading it to the patient record," Potter says. "Everyone is using this."

John Cox covers wireless networking and mobile computing for Network World.