Consumerisation of work

Consumerisation of work is happening, can't stop it, have to accommodate it. Can be embraced and managed. Professional people like using their own tools to do the job. Changing nature of work, more communities instead of teams. Need to make employees more self reliant, empower them, so have to relinquish control of the tools they use to do their jobs.

What drives consumerisation?
Social factors: Personal preference, peer influence, personal goals.
Performance: generally speaking consumer products perform better that enterprise devices, easier to use, also have tools the employer doesn't provide such as microblogging,
Economic: consumer technology often costs less as market is bigger, affordable personal purchases, responsibilities and costs transfer to individuals.

Consumer devices have huge diversity in model, OS and capabilities. Smart peripherals are developing. Displays you wear on your wrist to see tweets. Bluetooth devices accessing cloud services.

Rigid standardisation is impossible. Can't hold the line at one platform.
Need to look at new ways of managing and delivering. Standardise on protocols, not platform.

Some possible exceptions:
It's possible that some organisations might standardise on Apple only policy.
Some may have security and compliance demands become too onerous to support multiple platforms
Support costs of diverse devices and platforms may prohibit it

Consumerisation of applications. Exponential growth of apps from app stores, will hit 80 billion by 2014. Many are free or cheap eg Dropbox, document editing and annotating. Corporate app stores being developed. Much easier to develop and deploy applications.

Consumerisation of services. Emerging device plus cloud services eg Kindle
Affordable cloud alternatives to classic applications eg google,docs.
Cloud services for data management, backup, file sharing.
Communication and collaboration in the cloud eg social networking, VOIP, microblogging.
Are challenges including security and support, but can be overcome.

Future technology developments include improved user interactions across multiple devices. Smart TVs interacting with smartphones.
Flexible displays. Transparent displays, looks like pane of glass when turned off.
Mind based interfaces. Already developed is a small hat with EEG sensors plugged into mobile phone which analyses brain signals which can act as remote control for other things.

Technology scanning needs to keep up with consumer technology developments.

Consumerisation of me. Personal informatics. Applications which exist to help you support your personal goals, collecting and analysing information:
Life logging, interpersonal informatics, health and exercise, personal brand management, email sentiment analysis, reducing emotional influence in decisions, email analytics, mobile apps for cognitive behavioural therapy.
Will throw up all sorts of issues in the enterprise. Keep an eye on this!

Corporate Benefits of consumer technology include user satisfaction,technical superiority, performance, cost reduction, innovation

CIOs are trying to balance 4 conflicting goals:
Social goals. Keep the employee happy. Much of the demand for device choice has a social component.
Operational goals. Have to keep the business running. Use of employee owned devices has support implications, what if employee loses own phone?
Financial goals. Have to manage costs. Issues such as roaming data, fixed data caps are a challenge with employee-liable contracts
Risk management. Stopping bad stuff happening, especially in areas such as security and data leakage.

CIOs need to decide how innovative they want to be:
Defensive- enforce rigid control
Reluctant toleration - allow more choice
Opportunists - explore new models such as bring your own
Aggressive - rip up all assumptions. Go for it!

Supporting "bring your own" technology:
Provide community resources.
Provide time limited support
Deliver secure and supportable applications
Have a contingency plan
Educated users
Suggest resources
Outsourcing

Recommendations:
Understand where consumerisation is already being used in your organisation
Review your technology strategy and propose how consumerisation is going to be accommodated
Harness employee enthusiasm for consumer technologies
Create an organisation that can accommodate and profit from consumerisation
Monitor key consumer technologies to better understand future application opportunities and support challenges

Good talk as always from Nick Jones.

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