Consumerization of IT & What Enterprises Should Anticipate

Employees nowadays are more familiar with a wider range of technology than technology managers often give them credit. It’s true that some employees don’t care about the technology they use; IT can provision these employees as before. But the ones who view technology as an extension of themselves will use their preferred technologies regardless of rules and guidelines to the contrary. CIOs need to engage with them rather than have them fired or held to account, because they’re the same forward-thinkers who are likely to identify emerging business opportunities for the enterprise. The CIO’s challenge is to facilitate and to accommodate this new paradigm strategically while still having proper control.

The approach can be elaborated as follows:

1. Opportunity for better results through the requests for support of personal or departmental technology

The IT organization should help users determine whether their decisions truly solves a problem. How a technology they want will help them and how their technology choice would change things, as well as whether our current IT organization has the skills to support, the technologies and processes that IT consumerization requires. The enterprise IT team must have at least a working knowledge of these technologies to ensure they can be integrated into the enterprise environment.

2. Shared Ownership Concept

In essence, through the shared ownership model, IT gets access to and appropriate control over the device to manage corporate applications and data, and the user gets control and rights to the device to install personal applications and access personal communications. Thus reinforcing the responsibility that the user or department assumes when it chooses technology, encouraging good behavior.

3. Information Systems as a Layered Cake

To view technology as a layered cake, with each layer managed and controlled the same way, is folly. For the same reason, policies are the key to effective technology usage, allowing IT to manage the various devices, applications, and data across the many layers of the technology. Some require more control or security than others. Policies based on role, information type, and other key factors let IT ensure security and execute compliance across technologies commensurate with the risk for each factor.

4. Flexible Control

Dealing with empowered individuals and co-ownership of technology processes likely sounds very messy to many CIOs, especially those who have been focused on operational efficiency, repeatable processes, and control-oriented compliance and security. The key is to control the assets that are worthwhile controlling or are legally required to be controlled.

5. Potential collaboration to innovate business processes

Understanding the employees’ need and demands to make them more productive over time also lead us to potential collaboration with other business like travelling agents, transportation companies, restaurant reservation app etc. Hence employee travel request and claim process will be done efficiently through the integration using a single access from employee mobile app. If the model is replicated to other enterprises which can adopt the same, then integration cost can be shared economically.