Yankee Group Says Consumerization in the Enterprise Will Cripple IT
Fifty Percent of Employees Feel Their Personal Technology Is More Advanced Than Workplace Technology
Boston, MA, August 6, 2007—Yankee Group today announced that IT’s steel grip on control of enterprise applications and services is slipping because of consumerization of the enterprise—the adoption of consumer technologies in the corporate environment. Nearly 50% of employees feel more empowered than IT to control their personal IT environment. This consumerization trend will be a nightmare for IT departments because it will create major maintenance and support problems that will swiftly overwhelm IT resources.
According to the recent Yankee Group Report, Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management, enterprise IT that tries to ignore the adoption of these technologies in the workplace will potentially lead to a hazardous mix of secured and unsecured applications in theenterprise. Instead, IT must adopt a Zen-like approach to manage the technology and the rogue employee. Ceding control to end users via a internal customer care cooperative model reduces IT's burden while improving customer satisfaction. The Zen support model is fundamentally different than most IT organizations today because it doesn't seek to dictate policy and enforce standards, but rather set guidelines and steer users in the right direction.
"As ubiquitous connectivity takes hold, consumers are driving more innovation and technology trends in the enterprise," said Joshua Holbrook, Yankee Group Enterprise Research program manager. "Enterprises can't avoid consumerization or implement traditional approaches to managing consumerization in the enterprise because it's failing. It's time for a new operating model; an IT care co-op is the solution."
Some best practices in a Zen-like approach to an IT care co-op solution include:
- Using Web 2.0 tools to create customer care cooperatives that save IT time and money while improving end-user satisfaction
- Facilitating online social networks and wikis, which allow end-user communities to manage their own IT support function
- Setting security baselines that aren't flexible for IT groups to gracefully stitch wikis and collaborative technology into their existing infrastructure
Yankee Group finds that success will not rely on technology alone. In fact, to manage consumerization, enterprises should provide employees with incentives to prevent circumvention of care co-op tools.
Yankee Group (www.yankeegroup.com)
The people of Yankee Group are the global connectivity experts-the leading source of insight and counsel trusted by builders, operators and users of connectivity solutions for nearly 40 years. We are uniquely focused on the evolution of Anywhere connectivity, and chart the pace of technology change and its effect on networks, consumers and enterprises. Headquartered in Boston, Yankee Group has a global presence, including operations in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Visit www.yankeegroup.com.
