Rising Use of Consumer Technology in the Workplace Forcing IT Departments to Respond, Accenture Research Finds ⇢

Accenture looked into the ‘consumerization’ of business IT, and has hard evidence that it is happening, and fast:

Rising Use of Consumer Technology in the Workplace Forcing IT Departments to Respond, Accenture Research Finds

Rising Employee Technology Expectations

  • Over a quarter (27 percent) of employees routinely use non-corporate applications downloaded from the Internet in the workplace as they search for applications that help them to work better
  • The first step toward IT consumerization often involves accessing corporate email in non-corporate settings, largely as a result of increasing smartphone penetration, with 30 percent saying they routinely check email before they go to bed
  • Employees also revealed a desire to access Web-based corporate applications and databases, as 14 percent reported accessing corporate apps and databases from their consumer devices on a regular basis 

Employees Solving Their Own Tech Challenges

  • A large proportion of employees (43 percent) feel comfortable and capable of making their own technology decisions for work, indicating a ‘technological empowerment movement’ sweeping across users worldwide
  • There is also an increasing trend for employee driven technological innovation, as 24 percent of employees admitted to coming up with their own consumer technology solution to help solve a business problem

Management is Scrambling to Embrace Consumer Technology

  • The use of personal devices in the enterprise increases dramatically amongst IT executives (54 percent) and other management executives (49 percent) when compared to employee adoption rates
  • Management and IT executives know that using the latest technology is a big priority for their employees, with 88 percent of executives collectively saying that consumer technology used by their employees can improve job satisfaction
  • Most executives approach consumerization as a series of ad hoc issues (e.g. “Should we allow corporate reports on iPads?” or “Should we allow social media?”). However, whilst more executives recognize the adoption of consumer technologies in the workforce as a strategic issue, only 27 percent have started to address the issue in a structured way.

The ‘consumerization of IT’ term is a bit misleading, but has firmly been adopted. It really is the demassification of IT: instead of the company making massive decisions based on an idealized group of employees, the company steps out of the way and lets emplyees make their own decisions about devices, apps, and, ultimately, everything else that was formerly delivered by diktat.

In the future, workers will decide

  • where to physically work while ‘at work’ — telework is becoming work, and businesses get to save money on space while workers get to save money on time.
  • who to work with — hollywood style auditioning for projects instead of interviewing for jobs.
  • what to work on — increasingly, workers will select among alternative gigs, or prioritizing across a collection of tasks.

The next phase of business will be more like a city than an army, where millions of independent decisions are made and the world is constructed bottom up. Workers expect bottom-up business, not top-down.

14 December 2011 8
business softwareconsumerizationbottom-up business

Notes

  1. stoweboyd posted this

← Previous Post Next Post →

About

Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. (More.)

Working on longer format projects, Sign up for the newsletter.

GigaOM Research analyst and curator.



Also writing beaconstreets.com.

Contact me. or ask me a question.



My Vizify profile.

Socialogy

  • Brian Solis | Brian and I debunk big data, and Brian makes the case for empathy.

  • Deb Lavoy | Deb is dubious about management's inclinations, and says, 'Just because you are networked doesn’t mean it necessarily helps you understand, or realize your needs more effectively.'

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

    • Hot Now

  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

  • Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven | Paul Ford

  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

    • Oldie

  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

    • Lynx theme created by Andrew Stichbury for Tumblr.