CSC Smart Business October Edition - People power
People power
The IT ‘nanny state’ is over and companies need to plan now to prosper in the Post-PC World, argue the LEF's Doug Neal and Jim Ginsburgh.
As consumer technology providers continue to innovate and drive down the cost of hardware, software and connectivity, businesses are on the cusp of major change. After many years of businesses paying premium prices for employees’ computers and network connections, staff are starting to turn this around through ‘bring your own technology’. This switch challenges existing IT practice but could bring major benefits.
In 2000 the Leading Edge Forum (LEF) conducted a mobility study tour of Scandinavia and Asia. These tours are regular events offered by the LEF in which participants can gain first-hand insights into developing technology and IT-enabled business operations around the world. In 2000 we studied and debated the emergence and likely impact of widely available mobile technology on the work place. Since then, the LEF has written a great deal about this consumerisation of IT. However, it is only in the last few years that consumerisation has moved beyond the committed early adopters and entered the always critical fast follower phase. The mass-market era of consumerisation is no longer far away.
Obviously, technology is a major driving force. Smartphones and tablets are powerful, easy to use, and selling in record-breaking numbers. Social media services such as Facebook and YouTube, the explosive growth of applications available in the ‘cloud’, and ever-better mobile connectivity are changing the way we all live and work. Many of the latest cars from Audi and other manufacturers can come with their own WiFi hotspot. These improvements will continue.
But perhaps most symbolically, many individuals, even many top executives, who never wanted to use or carry a PC, are enthusiastic iPhone and iPad customers. They want these new touch-enabled devices because they are fundamentally different from previous generations of IT equipment. There is something compelling about the touch interface that allows direct manipulation of an object. For the first time, computing seems to be appealing to the right side of the brain, and, rather than feeling like a chore, it is seen as enjoyable by people who are not ‘techies’. This is an enormous change for our industry.
There are also strong individual incentives. These days, employees need to be knowledgeable about technology as well as their jobs – what we call double-deep. To compete in today’s global economy, employees need to maximise their productivity, and this often means using technology in ways that make sense for them. They don’t want to compete with their global rivals with one hand tied behind their back.
End of the ‘nanny state’
The net of these technological, psychological and competitive changes is that we are entering a new, post-PC world. The old world of standard-issue corporate PCs and BlackBerries, all controlled by a pervasive IT nanny state, is no more.
During this transition, cherished practices and assumptions about enterprise IT will be radically altered. For example, businesses today increasingly collaborate with employees, partners and customers across the globe. But if we need to support a wide range of consumer devices as part of making ourselves easy to do business with, then why not do this for our employees as well?
Some of the other key changes we expect during the post-PC era transition, and the potential opportunities and challenges they offer, include:
- IT innovation will be driven by consumers as new IT technologies and services emerge first in the consumer rather than business markets offering productivity gains through leveraging the speed of the consumer innovation cycle.
- Consumer market scale and lower prices will offer scale to business markets where IT vendor margins have generally been higher than in the consumer sector. So businesses will achieve lower costs when employees ‘bring their own technology’ to work.
- Commoditisation of IT equipment and software brings higher reliability, so less support is needed. Significant savings as central IT support is cut back.
- Smarter workforce created through consumer IT continuing to foster a much more knowledgeable and IT-literate workforce. Double-deep employees leverage technology in new ways to impact top-line growth and enhance their value; they are also active partners in dealing with security.
- The reliable global network provided by the internet offers cheap and reliable connectivity as an alternative to private business networks at a fraction of the cost. This offers savings, as broadband connections will replace expensive privately-owned circuits, and productivity improvements, as they enable new applications such as HD video conferencing.
- Easy-to-use, variable cost services from global digital consumer companies such as Amazon give access to large-scale computing infrastructure with no capital investment. Capital will be freed up to concentrate on business opportunities rather than IT purchases.
- Free digital services offer a new model for businesses where services, for the majority, are free and paid for by advertising and other means. This offers cost savings and productivity improvements from using free, high-quality and reliable services such as Skype, instant messaging, email and collaborative applications.
- Global third-party, large scale service providers that previously had to be provided in-house are available from specialist suppliers over the internet, often substantially cheaper and just as reliable. Project capital and risk can be eliminated by leveraging the SaaS model. Adopting a standard offering removes the costs and delays of customisation.
- Lower switching costs for business replace the high IT switching costs associated with long-term deals supporting custom software and services. Commoditisation cuts switching costs dramatically. Prices are kept down, as there are fewer barriers to migrating to a competitor’s offer; lower acquisition costs because procurement processes are simplified.
Change is inevitable
As these changes show, the shift to the post-PC world will involve much more than just technology adoption. It requires a range of cultural and organisational shifts that challenge much of what enterprises currently think about IT. It would be counter-productive, and even dangerous, for IT executives to deny what is happening and refuse to engage in these post-PC change debates.
The inevitable result would be that employees saw enterprise IT and its policies as out of touch and increasingly irrelevant. This pattern must be avoided at all costs.
For example, when computers were expensive it made sense for organisations rather than individuals to buy them and take overall responsibility. Tomorrow, employees will be increasingly expected to be self-sufficient and responsible. In many cases this will include BYOT (‘bring your own technology’) policies, where devices are owned by the employee (perhaps funded by the enterprise), and with varying degrees of freedom in choice.
Each organisation will make its own decision about how far it goes down this track, and it is reasonable to assume that more security-dependent firms will attempt to retain more control – although we found evidence that even some of these firms are operating a policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ over the use of consumer technologies. But one way or another, every firm will need an effective post-PC strategy.
LEF Executive Programme clients can download a copy of the full report, Preparing for a Post-PC World at http://lef.csc.com/publications/932.
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