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.