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Consumerization study: IT pros swamped, behind on mobile

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:01:08 +0000

The consumerization of IT is a hot topic as employees increasingly bring their beloved gadgets from home to work. But just because it’s much discussed among techies doesn’t mean that most offices are ahead of the curve on this trend, at least according to new research from Unisys.

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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The real costs of cybercrime

Derrick Harris — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:17:45 +0000

Infographic updated: IT services company Unisys recently released its biannual Unisys Security Index, which tracks perceptions about Internet security across a variety of topics that affect both enterprise IT and consumers. Not surprisingly, the latest study, which surveyed more than 11,000 people across 12 countries, found that many have already been victims of cybercrime, are worried it will happen again and — in some areas — are willing to undertake or support some rather extreme efforts to stop the problem.

However, as the infographic below illustrates, it doesn’t matter whose data is targeted in cyberattacks for the companies left trying resolve events: They are going to pay a lot of money for damage control and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. That makes you wonder who has more to lose from cybercrime, consumers or the companies charged with protecting their data and helping mitigate consumer losses.

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Enterprise IT sees phones, Facebook and tablets! Oh my!

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 04:01:50 +0000

Enterprise employees have shifted from the gray and controlled world of corporate IT to the colorful Oz of consumer technologies, but according to data from an IDC/Unisys survey, IT is in need of some kind of wizard to sort things out. According to dual surveys of 560 IT managers and another interviewing 2,660 employees and executives at large companies, IT underestimates the number of employees using laptops, mobiles and tablets and is also unable to support those consumer devices.

This isn’t just a matter of IT angst; there are issues for the bottom line, as 89 percent of IT departments say they have not yet — and have no plans t0 — modernize customer-facing apps for mobile devices this year. A mere 6 percent have adapted their customer-facing apps for mobiles so far, which any of the 25 percent of folks using a smartphone for their web access instead of a computer can likely tell you.

Presumably as an IT services provider, we can expect to use this data to sell their services, which could help IT out of their morass. When it comes to mobile tech, Unisys/IDC counts laptops, smartphones and tablets. In some cases, totals will not add up to 100 percent because other options offered on the survey were not included in the infographic. Finally, the 20 percent of respondents who said they are texting, tweeting or emailing while driving need to stop. Seriously.

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What to Read This Weekend: How Nielsen Works

Janko Roettgers — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 07:01:27 +0000

If you’re only going to read one article this weekend, then let it be this neat magazine-style story about the Nielsen ratings system from iO9. The article features lots and lots of Star Trek pictures (it’s a Sci-Fi blog, after all), as well as some neat nuggets like this first hand-report from a former Nielsen family member:

“We weren’t to tell people or accept gifts or otherwise be persuaded to watch a certain show… We did make sure to watch Buffy and Angel in syndicated repeats, and made a special effort to watch the first season of the Venture Bros, which did need just another household or two to put it over the top. And it worked.”

iO9 writer Charlie Jane Anders makes a notes that Nielsen’s traditional TV ratings system is eventually going to be obsolete with the growing importance of online video, while at the same time putting things into perspective (people watch a lot of Hulu, but they still watch a whole lotta more broadcast and cable TV). What’s missing is the fact that online video measurement is in itself still an evolving science — something that became evident earlier this year when both CBS and ESPN3 claimed to have shown the Internet’s biggest sporting event.

Still, the article is a great read, if only for the fact that it really, really makes you want to have one of those slightly retro-futuristic looking black Nielsen measurement boxes in your living room.

Want to learn more about the future of media measurement in an online television world? Then make sure to check out our NewTeeVee Live conference, coming up on November 10, where we will have none other than Nielsen’s EVP of media audience measurement Matt O’Grady talking about these issues.

Unisys Offers Enterprises a Security Blanket in the Cloud

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:14:59 +0000

Unisys, the IT services company, today became the latest with a set of products aimed at helping customers create their own internal clouds. And in a month it will offer a true Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that will deliver computing and storage on demand and on a per-instance basis. Like many of the traditional IT vendors, Unisys is investing in a hybrid cloud strategy, which will involve customers revamping their own data centers through heavy virtualization to create an on-demand environment for IT workloads, while Unisys provides a pool of compute resources that a customer can dip into when needed.

To distinguish its offerings from those of other vendors such as Sun Microsystems, IBM or Microsoft, Unisys is pitching security. CSC says it is doing the same thing, although it will be a while before we see widespread product deployments from many of these vendors.

On top of its cloud computing layer, Unisys hopes to offer a platform with which customers can build Java, .Net and WebSphere applications. Those programs could be hosted internally at the customer’s site, on the Unisys cloud or in another provider’s cloud. However, if the customer chooses another provider’s cloud, he will lose some of the security features Unisys is touting. Unisys will also take its cloud further up the stack by offering software as a service. Rich Marcello, president of Unisys Systems and Technology, said email through a hosted Exchange server would be a good example of an SaaS offering. Another might be desktops delivered over the web.

At the end of the year Unisys plans to announce a service that will build out internal clouds for businesses, and by March 2010 aims to have a product that will bridge internal and external clouds seamlessly — something that every big vendor is working on.

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