Opening the Floodgates to Mass Consumerization

(Feb 9 2011) 4G , Mobile Internet

1. By Chris Marsh, Senior Analyst, Yankee Group

   With the advent of 4G, mobile and remote workers are spending increasing amounts of time away from their primary workspace and understandably want access to technologies that help them remain productive. The benefit is clear: In our Anywhere Enterprise: 2010 U.S. Enterprise Mobility/Empowered Employee Survey, Wave 1-4, workers self-state that their productivity increases by as much as 40 percent when they are provisioned with mobile form factors such as tablets, smartphones and netbooks.

   While many employers are still struggling to formulate ways to manage this evolution, employees push on regardless, resorting to using a variety of consumer tools and technologies for work purposes. Since 2008, many consumer tools have experienced an increase in employee usage. The largest increases include:

   • Social networking, which tripled from 10 percent to 31 percent.
   • Consumer instant messaging, which almost doubled from 25 percent to 47 percent.
   • E-mail, which increased from 43 percent to 52 percent.
   • Consumer-grade VoIP, which doubled from 7 percent to 16 percent.
   • Web-based productivity apps, which rose from 17 percent to 25 percent.
   • Mobile picture/photo messaging, which rose from 15 percent to 27 percent.

   The pace of change of consumerization seems irresistible, but IT departments need to clearly understand the consequences of adopting a permissive policy, as this will open the floodgates to mass usage. Yankee Group research shows that explicitly allowing employees to use consumer tools increases usage from 18 percent to 69 percent, nearly a four-fold jump.

   Clear Policies Help Manage the Tide

   Today, employees are confused as to what consumer technologies they are and are not allowed to use. For example, 40 percent of workers believe their IT department prevents usage of consumer applications for work purposes (compared to the 23 percent of IT decision-makers who claim that is their policy), and a sizeable 29 percent are not sure what the policy is.

   Being explicit about the policy goes further than just communicating whether usage is allowed or not; IT needs to outline the reasons why the policy is as it is. This includes outlining the relevant security risks associated with allowing usage, the possible implications for productivity around managing a heterogeneous environment of applications and the demands on providing support to users in such an environment. For example, it might be the case that Skype voice is allowed but the document-sharing functionality in its instant messaging feature is prevented for data security purposes. All these facets need to be communicated to users and potential users to make sure everyone is aware of the issues involved and the appropriate level of responsibility is being apportioned to users for their conduct in using consumer applications and devices.

   Such clear, transparent policies help enterprises avoid the worst of all scenarios: blind consumerization. Today, 20 percent of workers go on to use consumer tools although they are unsure whether it is permitted or not. This is on top of the 18 percent who use consumer tools even though they know their IT department prohibits it. In absolute terms, this amounts to 7 percent of all U.S. employees using consumer tools despite it being prohibited.

   To avoid losing all control, IT needs to be realistic about what they can and cannot control and implement clear policies. Only then will they be able to properly manage the flood of consumerization.

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