Consumerisation of IT - A new business opportunity
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 16 November 2010, 12:55 IST
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Bangalore: Information Technology should support employee innovations by adapting to a new 'empowered' era, where customers have more information available to them than ever before, and employees are bringing new technologies into the business first, reveals a recent Forrester study. Forrester conducted a survey which found that 30 percent of information workers in the UK, France and Germany, were doing at least one IT activity for work without the support of IT, such as downloading and regularly using applications on a work computer, or paying for a smartphone used for work. This is significantly a large number. "Game-changing technology will always be available to employees first. IT will always be playing catch-up," said Ted Schadler, Analyst at Forrester and Co-Author of Forrester's Empowered' book. His book urges organizations to unleash their employees, energize the customers and transform their business. IT has to deal with a new set of technologies to support the empowered customer and employee, with a particular focus on social and mobile. There are parallels between the company-wide change that is required for businesses to operate successfully in the empowered era. IT will have to co-ordinate with the rest of the business in new ways. Schadler stressed that IT will have to work with HR to educate employees about the risks of the technology they use, especially if they are bringing the technologies into the work place. And the arising risks have to be addressed in a different way as well. While businesses should be more open to weighing up the risks of innovation, IT needs to consider how much diversity their organization can tolerate. As Schadler pointed out, diversity is generally bad for productivity. There has to be a constant evaluation of technology. IT has to be pragmatic about the trade-off between diversity and uniformity.

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