The New Era of Consumer-Driven IT
The consumerization of IT across enterprise scale IT organizations has reached a tipping point. Mainstream IT organizations recognize that they can no longer ignore the transformational impact of consumer technologies in the enterprise.
A new IDC study, titled "IT Consumers Transform the Enterprise: Are You Ready?", reveals that while the consumerization of IT creates many new opportunities, including increased employee productivity, improved customer interactions, and faster and more agile business operations and decision making, it also results in significant IT management and security challenges.
"Today's CIOs have an opportunity to lead both business and IT innovation as they help their organizations decide how to best exploit the trend toward consumerization and personalization of IT," says Crawford Del Prete, IDC's Chief Research Officer. "In the face of rapid and intense consumerization of IT, CIOs are being called upon to work closely with business decision makers to create safe, secure, well-managed environments that allow the company to communicate and collaborate with customers and employees anytime, anywhere. CIOs need to lead the charge in order to ensure that customers are engaged, confidential data is protected, employee productivity is enabled, and the enterprise is getting the greatest return possible on every IT dollar it spends."
Based on a global survey of 804 IT decision makers and 1,040 consumer IT users, this IDC study finds that consumer use of smartphones, social networks and cloud services are fundamentally changing the way that enterprises do business.
The study found that different IT decision makers are using different tactics to address these rapid fire changes in their customer and employee expectations. One group of thought leaders, representing 19 percent of the total sample of IT decision makers surveyed, was found to be particularly proactive in getting ahead of the curve of consumer driven IT. This group generally emphasizes the need for the IT organization to work closely with business unit decision makers to aggressively integrate consumer technologies into a wide range of customer facing programs and internal business initiatives.
This group of "leaders" can be contrasted with more "mainstream" organizations that described themselves as market followers or ones that preferred to let business decision makers lead the charge without assistance from the IT team, in that they tend to be father along in exploiting the potential advantages of IT consumerization.
The research indicates these proactive leaders are more likely to realize greater benefits from the investments they are making to proactively addressing the consumerization of IT. For example:
- 45% of leaders report they are experiencing improved customer satisfaction and loyalty by using social networks and rich media, compared to 31% of the mainstream group.
- 32% of leaders say they are seeing increased market share due to their use of social networks and rich media, compared to 20% of the mainstream group.
- 32% note they are seeing greater penetration into new geographies, compared to 20% of the mainstream group.
Similarly, these proactive leaders are experiencing significant benefits from the use of public cloud services. Specifically, among the 616 organizations in the survey that are using public cloud services:
- 45% of leaders are reporting they are able to reduce IT staff, FTEs and/or training expenses using public cloud services, versus 35% of mainstream organizations.
- 36% of leaders are seeing improved competitive positioning from their use of public cloud services, compared to 28% of the mainstream sample.
- 36% of leaders see an improved ability to deal with spikes in demand using public cloud services, compared to 26% of mainstream organizations.
- 33% of leaders experience better end-to-end application performance from using public cloud services, compared to 24% of mainstream organizations.
While these trends were consistent around the world, the survey did show some international variability. For example:
- Among U.S. based IT decision makers currently using public cloud services, 42% said they were seeing reductions in IT staff expenses, FTEs, and/or training costs, compared to 37% of the total sample (including the U.S. respondents).
The experiences of the leaders provide important lessons for mainstream IT and business decision makers who are just now moving to fully exploit the business opportunities created by the consumerization of IT. Specifically, these experienced leaders point to the need to address the following concerns:
- Among organizations currently using public cloud services, data protection and backup frequency and accuracy in public cloud deployments are an issue for 42% of leaders, compared with 32% of mainstream organizations.
- Among all organizations surveyed, 31% of leaders are concerned about providing a consistent user experience to customers via social networks across all devices or browsers, compared with 26% of mainstream organizations.
- Among all organizations surveyed, 41% of leaders identify the ability to guarantee end-to-end user experience via mobile devices as one of their biggest challenges that result from customer use of mobile devices.
- Among organizations currently using public cloud services, 42% of European respondents noted they had security and compliance concerns related to these services, compared to 37% of global respondents (including European participants).
"The experience of these proactive leaders shows that IT and business collaboration is critical in order for CIOs to cost effectively and proactively manage, control and secure their IT environments at a time when mobility, personalization, cloud and social media are rapidly shifting business requirements," closes Del Prete.