Consumerization of IT Reaches Tipping Point, Ushers in New Era of Consumer Driven IT

ISLANDIA, N.Y., June 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- 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 new IDC study, titled "IT Consumers Transform the Enterprise: Are You Ready?", Doc #6201, May 2011, sponsored by CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) and released today, 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.

"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," said Dave Hansen, general manager, Enterprise Solutions and Cloud Management, CA Technologies.  "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."

"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," said Crawford Del Prete, IDC's Chief Research Officer.  "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."

Based on a global survey of 804 IT decision makers and 1040 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% 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," explains Del Prete.

Methodology

The information for this white paper came from 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.

Respondents in both surveys were randomly recruited and screened from international panels and came from eight countries: the United States, China, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, India, Brazil and Singapore. Global data was derived by weighting the IT executive survey by country GDP and the IT consumer survey by online population.

Both surveys were conducted over the Internet and administered in the local language.

These surveys were supplemented by a focus group of 10 U.S. IT executives responsible for new technology adoption and support, drawn from organizations from a range of industries and with revenue over $2 billion. Representative titles included senior vice president, Global IT, director of IT, director of IT Operations, vice president of Technology and Operations, and vice president of IT. The focus group was conducted in New York, April 2011.

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