The research sponsored by Unisys asked 2,659 information workers in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, as well as 564 IT decision makers in the same countries, about consumer devices and apps in the workplace. Just about everyone agreed that consumer products are invading the office, but the interesting parts were the differences between the two groups’ estimates of their prevalence.

• Workers say that 69 percent of their organization’s employees use smart mobile devices for business. Their employers think only 34 percent do.
• Thirteen percent of workers reported using tablets for business. Employers estimated only 6 percent.
• About 40 percent of employers said they let workers access non-work-related websites, but in reality 70 percent of workers are viewing them.
•  Forty-four percent of workers report using social networks for customer communication, while only 28 percent of employers believe that to be the case.

Overall, IT pros underestimate the use of consumer tech at work by 50 percent, concludes Unisys, which suggests corporate techies are doing a less-than-ideal job of supporting workers. But at least they know they are doing a bad job. On a one to five scale where five is excellent and one is abysmal, decision makers rate themselves only a 2.9 for overall support of employee-owned smartphones and tablets, social applications and integration of social apps with enterprise applications. This is lower than last year.

And sadly, for workers on the go, the outlook isn’t great for next year either. Only 12 percent of responding IT organizations said they have readied internal apps to work with mobile devices, and a hefty 76 percent have no plans to do so over the next year. Consumers aren’t getting much help either. Only 6 percent of firms have modernized customer-facing applications for mobile devices, and 89 percent say they have no plans to modernize in the next 12 months.

So what’s behind the relatively poor performance of IT departments when it comes to consumerization? Isabella Mark, the director of Global Solution Management at Unisys, puts it down to simple overload:

IT is falling behind in addressing – and benefiting from – consumerization of IT because of the sheer volume of consumer technologies they now have to deal with, the speed at which those technologies change, and the accompanying security and support challenges.

Unisys’ research has shown that 80 percent of IT respondents say consumerization is increasing their department’s workload. They’re clearly just swamped in coping.

What does Mark suggest IT departments do to keep up with the rapid rise of consumer tech at work? Basically, convert the problem into the solution by harnessing your employees’ love of this technology:

Through pervasive adoption and use of social media in their personal lives, employees have developed skills that can be of tremendous value to their employers. These skilled employees present their companies with a significant resource to improve business processes through contextual collaboration internally and externally.

At the same time, capitalizing on the sophistication employees have gained can help organizations reduce the security and privacy risks that can attend use of social media. There can be a bigger business risk if those companies don’t take action — loss of value-creating ability and competitiveness.

Are gadget-loving employees an underutilized resource at your organization? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user torisan3500

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That will come as no surprise to plugged-in professionals who have taken a look around at their colleagues lately (though the finding that, for the first time, iPhones have unseated BlackBerry devices  as the top choice for respondents may come as happy news to Apple fans), but what impact is this near-universal adoption of smartphones having on knowledge workers’ lives?

In one sense, the impact is grim. The survey of 2,300 mobile employees worldwide found that many are giving up exercising and sleep in favor of a constant connection to work.

• One in three respondents told iPass they sleep less due to work, with one in four mobile workers reporting less than six hours of shut eye a night
• More than half exercise erratically or not all, and 60 percent of the loafers blamed work for their sedentary lifestyle

We’re also emotionally dependent on our gadgets; 59 percent of plugged in workers said they’d be disoriented, lonely or even distraught without their smarthphone.

But one thing smartphones aren’t guilty of, surprisingly, is being a major time suck. We waste only about as much time checking emailing and Facebook and handling technical hiccups than we used to spend on cigarette breaks when that was the most common office addiction: a measly 28 minutes a day.

So in the one column, we’re filling our lungs with fewer toxic chemicals and getting massive amounts of stuff done. But in the other, the new way of working means little sleep and next to no exercise.

Are we better off?

Image courtesy of Flickr user shnnn.

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Beginning November 22, 2011, we will end support for the Gmail App for BlackBerry (installed native app). Over this past year, we’ve focused efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser and will continue investing in this area. Users may continue to use the app, if installed, however it will not be supported by Google, or available for download starting November 22.

I am guessing they want us to use the “exchange” equivalent for logging into Google Mail for Business, but for me, it was a great way to use personal Gmail account in an easy and efficient manner. Others too are lamenting Google’s move.

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Jobs has succeeded in transforming the way we consume information in both our personal and work lives. With their intuitive interfaces, sleek lines and quality craftsmanship, it’s easy to see why so many of us now carry an iPhone, iPad, or both with us wherever we go. Raise your hand if you have an iPhone or iPad? If you haven’t got your hand up, chances are the person next to you does.

The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, nor was it the first with a touch interface, but it revolutionized the way that we browse the internet on our cells and consume data. Even if you don’t have an iPhone, your Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone handset have all been influenced by this device.

And this brings me to our obsession with smartphones.

We’ve all been there, checking our emails on our smartphones at midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 6 a.m. We now shut the office doors and immediately start working again on the train, the bus and in taxis. We are permanently connected. According to a national survey by Telenav, a third of Americans would rather give up sex than their smartphone. They’d also be willing to wave goodbye to chocolate, caffeine and exercise before they parted with their beloved device.

UK adults and children are just as bad. UK communications industry regulator Ofcom has discovered that 60 per cent of teenagers describe themselves as “highly addicted to their smartphone.” Almost half (47 percent) of teenagers and 22 percent of adults also admit to using their device on the toilet.

Our cell phones have now transformed from a device for contacting and playing Snake to becoming a central part of our personal and working lives. The mobile workforce can now check emails on the move, hold video conferences, proof documents and log in to check their bank balance when sitting on the train or working from a cafe. Our obsession has been fueled by just the right apps to help us accomplish these tasks.

With more than 400,000 iPhone apps and more than 300,000 Android apps now available, what are the apps that today’s web workers should look at using to aid productivity and increase efficiency? Below are just some of the apps that I find indispensable:

• CamCard: This great app takes a picture of a business card and automatically adds the information to your contact list. No more rummaging through pockets trying to locate the contact details of the people you met at various meetings and events.

• Evernote: A popular tool with remote workers, Evernote enables you to quickly capture anything. Whether it’s a photo, a screenshot or a web site, whatever you capture is stored, processed and made searchable.

• Huddle: With Huddle’s iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry apps you can access my company’s cloud-based collaboration platform and manage your projects, files and people from any location, at any time of day.

• Twitter: Yes, it can be dangerously addictive, but having Twitter on your mobile ensures that you are constantly connected to the latest updates from your community and you can track what is being said about your company.

• 1Password:  How many times have you sat on your iPhone/iPad trying to remember one of the numerous passwords you have for a wealth of websites and apps? 1Password securely stores the information required and logs you into websites immediately.

• Skype: If you’re on Verizon Wireless’ network, Skype mobile gives you free Skype-to-Skype calls and IM.

• QuickOffice: Access, create, edit, and share Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

• Expensify: This fantastic app allows you to capture your expenses and receipts from any location. You can track everything and build your expenses reports on the move.

• Bloomberg Mobile:  Keep up to date on the latest international business news, stock quotes and company descriptions, etc.

• Instapaper:  Ever found a great article that you just don’t have time to read? Instapaper ensures that you can come back to it later.

What other mobile productivity apps do you use and love? Let me know in the comments below.

Hear VMware’s CTO Stephen Herrod talk about the three key pillars of enterprise mobility — apps, data and people — at Mobilize, September 26 and 27.

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Symic.

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The purchase seems like a smart move for RIM. Tungle offers an attractive set of features for RIM’s core customer base of enterprise users, and should enable the company to bolster the calendaring tools it offers under the BlackBerry brand. Tungle provides a very easy-to-use online meeting scheduling app that lets users propose multiple meeting times to one or many people, inside or outside their organization and across time zones. It also allows for users to broadcast their meeting availability on a publicly accessible page; others can then schedule meetings. The app integrates with a variety of calendar, email and scheduling applications, including Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, Lotus Notes, BlackBerry Yahoo, Windows Live, Facebook, TripIt and Plancast. There are Tungle mobile apps available for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but the Tungle acquisition is the latest in a string of productivity and UI-related purchases RIM has made recently. It bought social contacts service Gist back in February, and prior to that, had acquired connected navigation company Dash, WebKit browser experts Torch Mobile and UI shop The Astonishing Tribe. These purchases should enable RIM to augment and improve the kind of applications — email and calendar tools — that appeal to the BlackBerry’s core set of business users. Perhaps a renewed focus on productivity and UI will be enough to stave off the threat of Apple and Android, which have already gained a significant foothold in an enterprise market that was once dominated by RIM.

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1. Shoeboxed. Organize your receipts and business cards through this service (see our review here). With the web app, you scan in what you want to save and organize or mail in your “shoebox” of items to scan and let Shoeboxed do it for you. The results are searchable and easy to organize. With the iPhone app, you can take a photo to digitize a receipt or card.
2. Evernote. The Evernote browser bookmarklet makes it easy to save all or portions of a web page to categorize content and images (see our review here). The Evenote iPhone app lets you do the same with a snap of your iPhone camera, create notes and record audio memos.
3. Bento. If you’re using the personal FileMaker Pro application (see our review here), you might want to try the iPhone app which can operate as a standalone app or sync with your desktop version. You can get mobile access to your Bento libraries and collections, create new records, edit details, sort data, and modify forms.
4. Freshbooks. If you’re looking for easy invoicing, Freshbooks is a great solution (see our coverage of the app here). You can use the MiniBooks app to sync with your Freshbooks account and manage invoices, time, and other related functionality.
5. Task2Gather. Gather, manage and share your tasks, subtasks and projects for yourself and your team (see our review here). Sync the iPhone app with the free Task2Gather desktop application and manage tasks on the go.
6. SugarSync. Work in the cloud, collaborate, back up and sync important documents across all platforms and key devices with this pervasive application (see our review here). View and share files on your iPhone to keep the work flowing, even if you’re not near your computer.
7. TimeBridge.While TimeBridge sets out to be your meeting and conference call one-stop solution (see our review here), the iPhone app gives you control of your meetings while you’re traveling. Call in and handle business on the go.

And a little something extra: Starbucks has not one but two iPhone apps, so you can find the Starbucks nearest you and even build a perfect drink that you can share with friends. Then use your iPhone and the Starbucks Card Mobile to pay for your java (in selected stores) and manage your account. I’ll take my cuppa joe with extra cream, please.

What is your favorite web application with a companion iPhone app, and why?

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The telescopic XShot camera extender ($29.95) is a simple but “wow” device that allows you to mount your digital camera and then extend it away from you so you can include yourself in the pictures. At conferences, however, the clever device is being used by attendees to raise their cameras above the heads of a crowd or audience to more easily capture footage of speakers onstage or simply get a more interesting view of the room. The XShot 2.0 gives you as little as 9 inches and up to 3 feet of extension.

XShot has also come out with a new device that is equally as useful in a thump-on-the-head “why didn’t I think of that!” way. The XShot iPhone Case ($29.95 ) fits iPhone 3G and 3GS and features a tripod mount to quickly and easily attach your iPhone to a tripod (such as my favorite Gorillapod) — or the XShot Camera Extender — to get the same added functionality as you would with a regular digital camera. The tripod mount isn’t a separate attachment but already built right into the case, which is perfect for me because I always lose extra attachments and peripherals.

Right now, you can only preorder the iPhone case at XShot.com; the new product will be available starting in November. You can also pre-order an XShot and iPhone Case bundle for $44.95.

And rumor has it XShot is coming out with yet another device in the near future — a micro version of its XShot 2.0 that is smaller and lighter, but still highly functional.

What is your current favorite “must-have” gadget?

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As a big fan of iPhone apps and a reviewer of applications of all kinds, I’m constantly trying to come up with a “big idea” that will be a runaway App Store sensation — and bring in some passive revenue on the side — and so have been pondering the question “What does it take to make an iPhone app?”

To answer this, I interviewed Jeremiah Dunham, a programmer at Design-PT, Inc., an Anchorage-based technology solutions company, which recently came out with the latest version of its iPhone app Here Say. The premise of Here Say is that you can be in a location, take notes digitally through the Here Say app and post them. These notes can be viewed by others who are close by. Your notes could be a quick restaurant review, a mention of road conditions, a particularly scenic view, whatever you’d like to remember next time you are in an area or that you’d like to share with anyone else using the same application when they pass through the same area.

The early impetus for creating Here Say came from the way Design-PT’s principal, Orion Matthews, carried a notepad around everywhere taking notes about anything and everything. In speaking with Dunham, the idea for a digital version of this analog location-based note-taking seemed like the start of a promising application.

Version Evolution

Like any software product, Here Say has gone through several iterations so far. v1.0 users had the basic ability to post geo-coded notes; browse notes posted nearby up to 500 miles away (there is a slider where you can adjust your perimeter); and choose private or public posting. v2.0 added the ability to post photos; comment on other people’s posts; view everything posted in the world; see a compass heading, and the ability to report abuse. Dunham also moved the “My Notes/All Notes” filter from the settings page to a button on the main view.

As with any development process, feedback from users can initiate changes although the developer stands firm that Here Say will never become another community building app. With v2.0.1, the radius of nearby notes was increased to 2,500 miles away; the ability to ban abusive users was added; and due to user feedback, Dunham moved the My Notes/All Notes filter back to the settings page — the button on the main view caused too much confusion.

iPhone App Development Challenges

Dunham says learning Objective-C and the Cocoa framework was challenging, since he had never developed a Mac or iPhone application before.

“The example apps are great, and Apple’s documentation is very good, but there were a few subtle aspects of developing Here Say that could only be discovered empirically,” Dunham explains. “One good example of this is the trade-off between speed and accuracy when accessing the GPS in the iPhone.”

In order to provide the maximum accuracy with acceptable speed for Here Say, Dunham had to come up with an algorithm that allows the user to see something relevant quickly, but then refine what they are seeing as more accurate GPS coordinates came in.

The limited resources of the iPhone were also tricky. “As developers, we always try to write applications that perform well, but the iPhone raises the performance requirement pretty substantially. When compared to a standard laptop or desktop machine, it has a limited amount of computing resources on it and the usage pattern is totally different,” says Dunham, adding, “Apple’s philosophy on this is that you maximize the usage of the iPhone’s limited resources and hence the user experience by only allowing one app to run at a time. That is a blessing and a curse to developers. It’s a blessing because you don’t have to worry about another app hogging all of the resources behind the scenes, ruining the user experience. It’s a curse because you have to do a lot of caching and other performance optimization tricks, since you have the user starting and stopping your app all the time.”

Business Reasons Behind Developing iPhone Apps

There were a couple of reasons for Design-PT to develop an iPhone app.

• To get experience with iPhone app development. Says Dunham, “I believe that mobile application development will continue to be a growth area for many years to come and the demand for skilled mobile application developers will increase substantially. As someone who writes applications for a living, getting this experience is an exercise in survival as much as it is fun or cool. I experimented with developing for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry, but the iPhone is miles ahead of those platforms, so that’s why I got serious about writing an iPhone app as opposed to something else.”
• Business diversification. Dunham says that as an IT services firm, all of the company’s revenue comes from contracting,
  consulting and IT support services. “It’s only natural that we would want to use the software development capability that we already have to create a product that offers a revenue stream that is entirely uncorrelated from our other lines of business.”

Reaching “Critical Mass”

Some reviews of Here Say note that the user base for the app is still small and to work well, there needs to be a higher adoption rate. However, according to Dunham, it really depends on how and why you are using Here Say. The most common use for the app today is informal polls and discussions, like a traditional web forum or message board. The current user base — a few hundred users per day — seems to be using Here Say effectively in this manner.

In terms of the application’s potential for news and reviews, Here Say could achieve a critical mass in individual markets — cities or regions — with only a few hundred or a thousand users in that market. Dunham says the ultimate goal is to create a global community so that you could pick up Here Say and get the buzz on every major city or landmark in the world. “That would require maybe a thousand users in every major city or region — probably a few million users in total.”

The Pay Off

Because Here Say is free, I asked Dunham where he sees revenues coming in. Dunham speaks of an “augmented reality” with the possibility of leasing every acre of land in the world as an advertising space.

“Let’s say that you wanted to advertise to people in Times Square. That would probably be prohibitively expensive in the physical world,” says Dunham. “In the augmented world of Here Say, anyone who wants to lease that space can put their message at the top of the app. This is, of course, predicated on the idea that the app is getting a lot of eyeballs in Times Square and that advertisers really want location-based advertising. The critical mass for this is, like most things for Here Say, location specific. A bunch of users in a small area would make that area valuable to advertisers.”

Besides dollars, Here Say has helped to establish the firm as a player in the mobile application space in Alaska. The company has also received inquiries from existing and potential clients because of it, and gained PR opportunities related to the app.

“It has also been a great morale booster for our organization,” Dunham admits. “Most people in our office have iPhones. and there was a lot of excitement about the fact that we were going put our own stamp on it. This was one small way for us to reassert our focus on innovation.”

Have you developed an iPhone app? What has it done for you and your company?

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