New Era Of Consumer-Driven IT Arrives

The consumerization of IT across enterprise scale IT organizations has reached a tipping point where mainstream IT organizations are recognizing that they can no longer ignore the transformational impact of consumer technologies in the enterprise, a study has found.

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.

Widespread consumer adoption of the cloud is here, with cloud-based applications and social networking becoming the norm. The adoption of these services is ushering in a new era of consumer driven IT, where CIOs are facing tremendous pressure to satisfy the pervasive and real-time demand for data and services from business users within their organizations. The cloud is enabling enterprises to be more agile, offering organizations the opportunity to innovate in their product or services offerings. The days of the CI "No" are over, as the new generation of workers and customers are demanding an "always-on, always connected" experience. While new opportunities are clearly emerging, so are the risks. The need for reliable IT management and security solutions across all environments, specifically virtual and cloud, are become increasingly important to ensure that this next generation of IT is successful.

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 percent report they are experiencing improved customer satisfaction and loyalty by using social networks and rich media, compared to 31 percent of the mainstream group.

32 percent say they are seeing increased market share due to their use of social networks and rich media, compared to 20 percent of the mainstream group.

32 percent note they are seeing greater penetration into new geographies, compared to 20 percent 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 percent are reporting they are able to reduce IT staff, FTEs and/or training expenses using public cloud services, versus 35 percent of mainstream organizations.

-- 36 percent are seeing improved competitive positioning from their use of public cloud services, compared to 28 percent of the mainstream sample.

-- 36 percent see an improved ability to deal with spikes in demand using public cloud services, compared to 26 percent of mainstream organizations.

-- 33 percent experience better end-to-end application performance from using public cloud services, compared to 24 percent 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 percent said they were seeing reductions in IT staff expenses, FTEs, and/or training costs, compared to 37 percent of the total sample (including the U.S. respondents).

Comment from Crawford Del Prete, IDC's Chief Research Officer: 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 towards consumerization and personalization of IT. CIOs are being called upon to do more than just maintain IT operations behind the firewall. 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. 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.

About the study: The IDC study ("IT Consumers Transform the Enterprise: Are You Ready?") was sponsored by CA Technologies and is based on two global surveys plus a focus group of IT executives, all of which were conducted in March-and April, 2011. IDC surveyed 804 IT executives from organizations of over $1 billion in revenue with responsibility for or influence over their organization's strategy for public cloud, social, and mobile initiatives. A separate survey consisted of 1,040 IT consumers who use public cloud, smart mobile devices, and/or social networks for personal or business purposes. To qualify, respondents had to be fully employed, over 17 years of age, and use a PC or other mobile device for personal and/or work purposes.

Contact: http://www.CA.com