CIOs beware: the digital natives are getting restless

By Stuart Corner
Monday, 30 July 2007 11:40

Opinion and Analysis

Datamonitor has found "startling gaps" between the extent to which consumers use new IT&T technologies in the home, and their availability in the workplace, and says tech savvy users are putting pressure on CIOs. Gartner goes further, saying that employers should be "evaluating employee preferences and expectations" and advising organisations to provide "a range of corporate options, as well as selective support to personal devices or services."

The employee 'tail' is starting to wag the IT department 'dog'. What is the world coming to? The stunning advances in information technology that have put more computing power into a cellphone than was used to take man to the moon in 1969 have  put into the hands of consumers technology that just a few years ago was within only the financial reach of decent-sized corporations.

Manufacturers have made much of it easy to set up and use. But technology that can be implemented by one tech-savvy consumer in their home cannot be any more easily implemented in a corporation than the technologies of two decades ago. Organisations must consider the many issues of process, policy, procedures, compliance, security, resilience and redundancy to which many consumers give scant regard.

The result is that tech savvy employees get frustrated when technology and applications they use at home are not available at work, when they believe passionately that such facilities could greatly increase their and their employers' efficiency and productivity. So they harass their CIO.

Datamonitor conducted research in April 2007, commissioned by Dimension Data, focussing on the areas of unified communications and security. Two groups were surveyed – IT Users (anyone using PC at work for more than 15 hours per week); and IT managers (those with responsibility for IT purchasing decisions). The report is due to be published in late August 2007.

Datamonitor found that: "Consumers and home users are now setting the agenda with regards to the adoption of new technologies. And these users are emerging as a major influence today on the use of IT in business. And a lot of this influence is coming from the younger generations, 'digital natives', who have grown up with computer technologies and the Internet."

The survey results show the extent of this trend. "Two of the most startling gaps," Datamonitor says, "were with instant messaging and Internet telephony. Eighteen percent stated that they used Internet telephony at work, as compared to 40 percent who answered that they used it privately. With IM, the figures were 29 percent at work, and 52 percent at home."