CIOs beware: the digital natives are getting restless

Stuart Corner
Monday, 30 July 2007 11:40

Opinion and Analysis

However, when the 'at work' figures are broken down further the discrepancy becomes more pronounced. Of the 18 percent who said they used Internet telephony at work, eight percent were using their own and 10 percent using work provided facility. Similarly, for IM 16 percent were using work provided technology, while 13 percent were using their own.

Datamonitor concluded: "The large discrepancy between use of these two important UC technologies at home and work, plus the fact that IT users were bringing their own UC applications to use at work, shows that there is a real end user push for the rollout and adoption of these technologies as communications tools."

For Gartner, mobile email is the main driver of what it calls the 'democratisation of IT. "Once the preserve of the business elite, wireless e-mail is undergoing a democratisation process that will bring it to the masses, says Gartner. "Not only is wireless e-mail spreading ever-wider across the enterprise but consumers will increasingly access their email on mobile devices," says Gartner, and it expects wireless email to reach commodity status by 2012.

This clearly has the potential to expose organisations to increased security risks, but rather than simply try and block the trend and enhance protection, Gartner says CIOs should accept the inevitable and accommodate it. "Today wireless e-mail is spreading across the enterprise and if not supported by the IT organisation, individuals will find their own ways to access work e-mail on personal devices with significant security implications," says Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner.

She advises organisations to "accept the consumerisation and commoditisation of mobility products and evaluate the impact of wireless e-mail on the IT organisation, investments and deployments when planning a wireless e-mail strategy."

She also stressed "the importance of evaluating employee preferences and expectations in terms of devices, applications and services when planning for wireless e-mail deployments and advised organisations to provide a range of corporate options, as well as selective support to personal devices or services."

If Datamonitor and Gartner are to be believed, the world of corporate IT is heading for a paradigm shift and CIOs that ignore or obstruct this 'consumerisation' will do so at their peril.