Consumer i Zat Ion of IT Study

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I D C I V I E W C O N T E N T

2011 Consumer izat ion of IT Study: C los ing theConsumerizat ion Gap

July 2011

By Frank Gens, Danielle Levitas, and Rebecca Segal

Sponsored by Unisys

Content for this paper is excerpted directly from the IDC iView2011 Consumerization of IT Study: Closingthe Consumerization Gap, July 2011, sponsored by Unisys. The multimedia content can be viewed athttp://www.unisys.com/iview.

Consumerization Is AcceleratingConsumerization of IT is fundamentally changing the way IT and business in general operatestoday. It is deeper and much farther-reaching than simply allowing employees to bring their ownpersonally-purchased PCs and devices to work (also known as bring your own devices, or BYOD).It touches upon enterprise use of applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social media withconsumer roots, and is dramatically extending a wide range of employee-facing (internal) andcustomer and partner-facing (external) business processes.

To better understand the size, scope, and complexity of this phenomenon, IDC worked with Unisys for the second year running to gauge how consumer technologies are being used in theworkplace, and how enterprise IT shops are faring in addressing this changing landscape. As we didlast year, we conducted a major, worldwide survey of over 3,000 information workers and businessexecutives in nine countries. Some results were expected, others were surprising.

Overall, we found that employees who use PCs, smartphones, and/or tablets for work for the restof this study they will be referred to as iWorkers are moving much faster to adopt and useconsumer technologies in the workplace than most IT groups are moving to support them. Perhapsmore concerning, this trend is happening faster than IT realizes. This large and growingconsumerization gap is not only a threat to employee productivity and morale its also a growingthreat to enterprises ability to compete in the marketplace, as these technologies are also becomingimportant tools for reaching customers, prospects, and partners.

Key findings regarding the accelerating rate of consumer IT adoption in the enterprise include:

Consumer technologies are already being used extensively in the enterprise, and are growing inimportance

Demand for mobility is accelerating and amplifying all of this smartphones, tablets, and laptopscontinue to grow at the expense of traditional desktop PCs and as secondary and tertiary devicesto work-issued PCs

Its not just about devices: theres growing business use of a diverse range of social mediaapplications with consumer roots

The flow is two-way: work is flowing into personal time as well, which makes workers more productive


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Ongoing IDC research indicates enterprises are embracing the employee-owned device model. This isdue to the rise in individual smartphone purchasing, enterprises need to cut costs, and the availabilityof mobile device management (MDM) solutions that address a heterogeneous device environment.

Figure 1 demonstrates the magnitude of this trend. Today, 40.7% of the devices used by information

workers to access business applications are ones they own themselves, including home PCs,smartphones, and tablets such as Apples iPad. This is up 10 points from last years study in which30.7% of the devices iWorkers used to access business applications were personally-owned. Over30% of iWorkers use personally owned PCs for work, and nearly 10% reported using their personaltablet for work a device that did not even exist just 15 months ago. By the way, employees told usthat, by 2012, tablets importance for doing work will grow more than that of any other device type.


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Mobility is clearly a key driver in consumerization. As Figure 2 shows, PCs remain the most criticaldevice for getting work done; that hasnt changed materially (yet). What has changed is that iWorkersare increasingly dependent upon more devices (more types of devices and more personally acquireddevices) to get their work done, and are more dependent on mobile devices (as smartphone salesnearly double year on year, tablets rise in importance, and desktop PCs give way to laptops).

Consumerization of IT with or without IT support is happening and is creating more complexityfor organizations.


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Consumerization is not just about devices. As Figure 3 shows, use of consumer-inspired social mediasuch as Facebook and Twitter is also growing fast: almost twice as many information workers saythey are using these technologies in the workplace as last year. More employees are leveraging morereadily available tools, and the more customers, prospects, and employees adopt these tools, thegreater value they bring to iWorkers (due to the network effect). Further, because these tools are

largely free, easy to access and use, and already familiar to many iWorkers from their consumer life,its no surprise to see their adoption on the rise.

This adds another dimension to the complexity for IT, because more devices, times more apps,equals exponentially more complexity for IT to support and manage.


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And as we all know, these technologies are extending the workplace into our personal world. Figure 4shows this rather dramatically: almost 50% of information workers have used consumer technologiesto conduct work on vacation, 29% while in bed, almost 20% while driving and 5% while in a place ofworship. One out of two IT organizations in our study stated employee satisfaction and productivityare primary benefits to the organization of allowing employees to buy their own devices, and the

evidence can be seen in this figure. iWorkers are making the most of their commute time (includingwhen flying), are being more productive during so-called downtime (vacations, watching TV), and areeven squeezing in work in the bedroom and at family gatherings!

Further, driving home the tie between mobility and the desire to squeeze more productivity out of theirday, those with iPads were on average at least 10% more likely to engage in work from alternativelocations. We believe a key reason for this particular finding is that the iPad is especially good forinstant-on, quick access to work snacking. If you have a few minutes in between or during personal obligations, an iPad is a good choice because it has a much larger screen than asmartphone and a much faster boot-up than a PC or Mac.


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IT Is Struggling to Keep UpSo how are enterprises (and their IT groups) responding to this pervasive trend? The good news is thatenterprise IT groups acknowledge that consumerization is important to their businesses. The bad newsis that they are struggling to keep up. Some of the key takeaways from this years research are that:

Serious gaps exist in perception between iWorkers and IT organizations

Even IT organizations themselves say they are clearly being overwhelmed by the

consumerization trend

Figure 5 shows that IT leaders recognize reality: over 70% said that consumerization is inevitable,makes employees more productive, and will be an integral part of how their enterprise conductsbusiness. Further, nearly 8 out of 10 say their executives are expecting them to support consumerdevices in the enterprise. But the figure also hints at problems for IT: 80% say consumerizationincreases IT department workload.


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Unfortunately, both IT and the enterprises employees rated ITs performance in supporting thesetechnologies poorly. Figure 6 shows iWorkers rating for their IT organizations support for consumerdevices and applications across the board is less than 3 on a 5-point scale. But much worse was ITsown self-assessment in some cases it was a full half-point lower than that of its employees!

Most disturbing, IT groups rated themselves worse than they did last year they feel theyre losingground when it comes to closing the consumerization gap. ITs self-rating fell in each category inFigure 6, with the largest drops in support for employee-owned smartphones and tablets (from 2.7 to2.4) and integration of mobile devices with enterprise applications (from 2.6 to 2.3).


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The consumerization gap starts with visibility Figure 7 demonstrates that IT underestimated thenumber of information workers using consumer devices for work by nearly 50%, and the use of socialnetworks for customer communication by almost 46%. iWorkers overwhelmingly tell us they are usingsmartphones at work, but smartphones are only on the radar screen for 34% of IT respondents.Similarly, 13% of iWorkers are using tablets in the office, but only 6% of IT respondents are aware

they are being used.


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The visibility gap also extends to the use of social media and other consumer-rooted applications.Figure 8 shows that social networks and communities are being used at high rates by iWorkers forcommunication functions: over one in three say they use them for customer communications,employee communication, and advertising/PR. But tellingly, IT again underestimates the use of socialnetworks for business, in some cases strikingly so. Many iWorkers are clearly using these tools off

the grid, often withoutITs knowledge or approval.


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The slow pace of adoption in IT organizations actually comes as no surprise to IT itself. iWorkers ratethemselves as technology adopters along a nice bell curve a few percent say they are earlyadopters/first to use, a few are late adopters/laggards, with the vast majority sitting somewhere inbetween (Figure 9). In contrast, nearly half of IT respondents rate their department as late adoptersof/last to use technology, with a very small percent calling themselves early adopters. This speaks

loudly to the lack of confidence among IT organizations.


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Not only do IT organizations rate themselves as late adopters, but in fact they are also significantlybehind in adapting to the use of consumer devices in the enterprise (Figure 10). Shockingly, morethan 3 out of 4 are not taking advantage of smart mobile devices as a compute platform to interactwith employees and customers by modifying key applications, and have no plans to do so.

Importantly, this gap exists both in internally-facing applications (which employees would use toconduct day-to-day functions and activities) and customer-facing applications (which enable newways to interact with customers and support new business models). The slow pace of applicationintegration shows a lack of process for interaction at the point of customer contact if that existed,business applications could be better used on mobile devices to open up revenue opportunities.


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Looking at the same data by industry in Figure 11, while the number of organizations planning to adaptcustomer-facing apps to work with smart mobile devices is low across the board, it is somewhat higherin consumer-facing industries such as healthcare, retail, and finance. Traditional B2B industries such asprofessional services and manufacturing/construction have the lowest rates of adoption.

This is evidence that pull-through from customers (i.e., business pressure to engage with customersusing smart mobile devices) is one of the forces starting to drive a number of leading-edgeorganizations to embrace consumerization of IT. But even for industries that are ahead of theaverage, the rate of current development or plans to develop or modify apps to work with mobiledevices is disappointingly low. Companies need to realize and prioritize these efforts so that they canmake employees more productive and serve customers and partners more effectively as the globalworkforce becomes more dependent upon smartphones and tablets.

No wonder that IT thinks its failingas do iWorkers.

Whats Holding IT Back?

IT understands that consumerization is important and inevitable (even as it underestimates the extent

to which consumerization is currently happening). So whats holding it back from deeper support forconsumerization? This study surfaced three key issues:

IT is concerned about security

IT resourcing is strapped

IT policy is lagging


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First is the issue of security. Figure 12 shows that, from ITs perspective, security concerns are thesingle largest barrier to more successfully supporting consumerization. Generic security concernsand concern around introduction of viruses are the top two barriers cited. Developing policies tosupport and manage these devices is the other barrier that clearly stood out (more on this later).


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Digging deeper into the security issue, IT perceives employee-provided devices to be the major threat(Figure 13). While its no surprise that IT sees company-provided devices as less of a threat, theoverwhelming degree to which it considers employee-provided devices a threat nearly three timesas much is notable.


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Devices are not the only perceived threat. While more than 70% of IT respondents believe employee-provided devices to be a threat, a somewhat lower but significant percentage believe that consumer-rooted applications are also a threat, with over 30% citing social networking sites such as Facebookand Twitter/microblogging (Figure 14).


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Looking at security policies actually being practiced, some good news is that 90% of IT executivesorganizations are doing automatic antivirus updates on mobile devices, and 59% perform automaticbackup of these devices - both up from last years study (Figure 15). Less encouraging is a significantdrop in the organizations delivering single sign-on, requiring stronger passwords, and trainingemployees on device and information security. Not only is IT feeling less capable and competent, but

they are actually doing less to protect mobile device use across a number of key areas than theywere last year. Even as organizations are experiencing greater consumer device adoption within theenterprise, IT is struggling to keep up.


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Taking a step back, IT organizations are feeling overwhelmed in general by the consumerizationtrend, and suffer from limited resources to implement the necessary changes. Figure 16 shows ITexecutives rating of the urgency of seven broad areas of consumerization support fromdeveloping better policies around consumer devices, to upgrading the datacenter to supportconsumerization, to helping employees set up their devices. All seven were rated urgent to extremely

urgent! Addressing that long and urgent to-do list will take smart re-prioritization of resource andinvestment.

Comparing these data to ITs rating of security as the overwhelming barrier to broader adoption ofconsumerized IT in the enterprise reveals a bit of disconnect. IDC believes this primary focus onsecurity is likely a fig leaf that IT is hiding behind, and surmises the real issue is IT wanting tomaintain control of the infrastructure. On many occasions, IDC has seen IT managers play thesecurity card when they dont want to accommodate something new. The range of issues surroundingconsumerization of IT is in fact very wide, but security is a bogeyman, both easy to point to and verydifficult to argue against.


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The policy disconnect extends to social media and applications as well (Figure 18). iWorkers aretaking advantage of a broad range of consumer services at work, and a large percentage of thembelieve that their IT organizations permit activities such as accessing non-work Web sites, storingpersonal data on and attaching personal devices to PCs, and accessing social networks for personalreasons. But in reality, a significantly lower percent of organizations (with the exception of accessing

non-work email) have policies permitting such activities.

Once again, the gap between what IT policies say employees can do and what employees thinkthey can do/are actually doing is wide.

Steps to Close the Gap

So consumerization is important and inevitable, but most IT organizations are poorly equipped for itand see significant barriers to supporting adoption. What, then, is the average IT organization to do?

IDC believes there are several key things to consider:

The market (and your employees) is moving faster than you are. Last years studyhighlighted the gap between employee adoption of consumer devices and applications, and ITsreadiness to support and leverage this trend. Over the past 12 months, that gap has widened.While the number of mobile devices and applications has continued to grow exponentially, withthe total number of mobile applications in the market more than doubling year over year, ITorganizations are not keeping pace. A paltry number of them have made enterprise applicationsaccessible via mobile devices or even plan to do so in the next 12 months.


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iWorkers report using mobile devices and Web-based applications at a growing rate, and formore critical functions such as communicating with customers. This is no longer an analystforecast or a thought experiment. Its reality, and IT needs to urgently accelerate the pace to getwith the program.

Develop better visibility into your own enterprises adoption of consumer-rooted

technologies. Across the board, this 2011 study shows that IT departments significantlyunderestimate the nature and degree of consumerization going on right under their noses. IT isoperating with blinders on, and policies are out of step with the way consumers are using devicesand consumer applications. IT needs to put the tools and procedures in place to actuallyunderstand what types of devices and applications are being used throughout the organizationand for what purposes as a first step to actually getting in front of this trend.

Establish, or revamp, policies to deal with reality. Consumerization of IT is happeningwhether IT supports it or not; just say no obviously isnt working. Its arguably worse ifemployees are using the devices but IT is telling them not to. If IT were at least supporting thesedevices, it would have a fighting chance at getting the security and management issues right; butby putting blinders on, IT relinquishes all control. IT needs to revisit and revamp its policies toreflect what is actually happening in the enterprise, and to evolve from a knee-jerk dont do itpolicy to more sophisticated policies that allow workers to take advantage of these serviceswithout disrupting the IT infrastructure or compromising corporate security.

Invest in technologies and services that allow security on devices you dont control. Hand-in-hand with recognizing that devices are being introduced into the organization over which it hasno control, IT must implement new security policies, procedures, and technologies to address thevery real threats the devices bring. One example would be client virtualization by movingapplications and data from the device itself to a secure, centralized location, IT can re-exert anelement of control.

Reconsider your build/buy approach. The reality is that cloud and managed service providersoffer a built-in way to support multiple mobile devices; outsourcing services to a provider-managed cloud can enable the organization to support most of the leading devices withouthaving to dedicate internal staff or resources to build out the appropriate infrastructure.Leveraging cloud services to provide key IT services may help you avoid reinventing the wheel.

Engage business executives. Finally, given that these technologies are being used more andmore by employees to reach out to customers and prospects, business executives increasinglysee use of consumer technologies as a path to the marketplace, to reach new customers, toengage customers more deeply, and to take advantage of new business models. Its important toreach out to and engage these business executivesyou may find that their support is yourbest business case for funding consumerization of IT.

Consumerization of IT is no longer a matter of employees bringing smart phones and iPads into theoffice. It is now a phenomenon that opens up a whole new world of commerce and communication forenterprises of all types. For any business wishing to improve its connections with customers,partners, and employees; deliver services anytime, anywhere; and, perhaps most importantly, reachcritical new markets, it is essential that the IT department be able to support and enable suchcapabilities. Its time that CIOs and IT managers step up to the challenge and the opportunity.

MethodologyThe information in this iView comes from two Unisys-sponsored global surveys conducted by IDC inMay 2011. IDC surveyed 564 IT managers from organizations of more than 500 employees withresponsibility for purchasing computing devices or applications to support their enterprise. In aseparate study, IDC interviewed 2,659 information workers (iWorkers)/consumers who use smartmobile devices for business or personal use.


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Respondents in both surveys were randomly recruited and screened from international panels, andcame from nine countries: U.S., Brazil, Germany, France, UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia,and New Zealand.

These studies were a follow-on to inaugural research conducted in June 2010, which also surveyed

both IT managers and iWorkers on a global basis.

Note that the figures in some graphs may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

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