Consimerization of IT

Consumerization of IT

 

There’s a revolution taking place in IT.
The revolution is spearheaded by workers who are investing their own resources to buy, learn, and use a broad range of popular consumer technologies and application tools to get things done in the workplace.
These consumer technologies and tools are bringing down the old artificial barriers around the workplace. At work and at home and everywhere in between, tech-savvy workers and consumers are using the same powerful, widely available tools and applications – from smartphones and iPads to social networks and instant messaging - to stay informed, connected and productive in their professional as well as their personal lives. Add to that the changing usage demands of an always-on environment with anytime/anywhere access fundamentally changing support and service requirements.
This “Consumer-Powered IT” trend is already turning traditional IT models on their head. It’s a powerful new way to work that, in our view at Unisys, will transform organizations over the next three to five years and usher in a new wave of business productivity. And yet most organizations are woefully unprepared to capitalize on this powerful movement.
A recent Unisys study, conducted by IDC, exposes a troubling gap between the activities and expectations of new generations of “iWorkers” and their employers’ readiness to manage, secure, and support this movement—and capitalize on it. Capitalizing on it means; boosting productivity with new ways of connecting and sharing, staying competitive as an innovative company and workplace, and delivering IT flexibly while managing security.
Younger iWorkers are not demanding change—they are driving it through consensus usage motivated by mobility and interconnectedness. While iWorkers are intimately familiar and facile with technology, they have little understanding of the security risks, management issues, and policy and governance implications that arise from mass introduction of consumer devices and applications into the workplace.
Organizations, meanwhile, are still largely operating in the standardized, command-and-control IT models of the past. Those models are very good at managing risks and costs, but they prevent the typical organization from navigating the swift waters of breakthrough thinking and innovation being unleashed by the fourth wave of productivity.  
To harness the full power of this new wave of productivity, organizations need to modernize their IT environments in order to:

• Manage and support these popular consumer technologies;
• Secure critical data and assets against hackers, viruses, identity thieves, and other widespread consumer IT threats; 
• Offer the interactive “app” experiences that consumers are looking for when transacting with their suppliers;
• Handle the expected four-fold increase in transaction load that these new interactive experiences will impose on the IT infrastructure;
• Attract and retain the new generation of workers entering the workforce.

For organizations that embrace and capitalize on the wave of innovation being unleashed by this consumer-powered IT, the leverage is enormous - in terms of organizational flexibility, a more engaged and productive workforce, the ability to leapfrog established competitors, and, yes, even achieve cost avoidance.