consumer technology and its role in corporate it...

Consumer technology and its role in corporate IT systems

a whitepaper from ComputerWeeklyCW +

The pressure to allow employees to use more of the technologies they have at home in the workplace has reached critical levels. A survey by research firm Gartner reported that almost 75% of respondents have found users are connecting handheld devices to the enterprise network with or without permission. This eight-page guide for CIOs and senior IT professionals looks at the up and coming technologies and how business

is managing the challenges. Can CIOs turn this i-device invasion into a profitable business opportunity?

Contents

Consumer electronics are a risk that should be managed like any other page 2

The days when the IT department could ban gadgets or websites from the office are gone. Employees are increasingly IT-savvy and it is becoming harder to lock down corporate systems. So how should CIOs manage the consumer electronics that are infiltrating the workplace?

Intel and AMD systems-on-a-chip set to cut cost of rich media computing page 4

Integrated chipsets ruled the roost at the CES 2011 show in Las Vegas in January, with leading chipmakers Intel and AMD both offering processors that combine multiple PC systems on a single chip. Find out what manufacturers are planning to do with this new technology.

Heroes or villains? Employees who use their own kit to work smarter page 5

IT’s role is changing from one of controlling access to equipment and software, to risk management as tablets provide business users and consumers with a new way to access the web and applications. What sorts of technologies should employees be able to use in their workplaces?

The consumer is increasingly king – even when it comes to business page 7

The line between business and consumer comms technology is becoming ever more blurred. However, consumer behaviours used in some business will prove costly, not only from lost productivity, but also increased and unbounded costs.

These articles were originally published in Computer Weekly magazine.

To print this document, select “Shrink to printable area” or similar in your print menu.

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Consumer electronics are a risk that should be managed like any otherThe days when the IT department could ban gadgets or websites from the office are gone, writes Cliff Saran

Industry gurus are warning that the old ways of doing things can-not continue. The idea of travel-ling to a place of work, working

at least an eight-hour shift using tools that the employer provides, dates back to the industrial age. Productiv-ity was a measure of the number of components that came off the pro-duction line in a day.

Bill Jensen, co-author of Hacking Work, a book which looks at how in-dividuals can overcome corporate shackles, believes people are fighting back: “The corporation still runs on principles from the industrial revolu-tion. The corporation owns the work tools and processes to get the work done. In the knowledge and service economy, work is much more de-pendent on individuals, but we have not changed the processes.”

He says that companies need to send work and processes to the col-laborative, and need to operate as if they have a collaborative of 1,000 in-dividuals. “It has not changed be-cause institutions can still make money, and it is too risky to change.”

But change is happening – individ-uals are fine to go along with some processes, but they will hack around others, and not tell the company what they are doing, warns Jensen. “We are heading in the path where people carry a portfolio of tools to which ever work they go to.”

The mainframe and the minicom-puter mirrored the traditional ap-proach, since they were expensive machines. Access was highly control-led. In 1982 the PC was the first break-through in commoditised IT. People no longer needed a data processing manager to produce reports. They had Visicalc. When the Macintosh came along in 1984, it brought affordable desktop publishing, revolutionising the magazine business.

PCs became uncontrollable be-cause IT had no easy way of manag-


“It’s harder to lock things down and users are becoming increasingly savvy; individuals are more important and companies must start supporting them”

ing them. In the late 1990s Gartner estimated that desktop PCs cost a business £5,000 per year each: time to regain control of the desktop, so IT deployed the managed desktop – a locked-down environment, which is managed much like how the business used to manage the mainframe. Mod-ern enterprise desktops provide staff with a suite of corporate applications with zero flexibility to manoeuvre.

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According to Jensen, “Individuals are being screwed by IT. We have to have secure desktops, but IT is doing zero analysis on how much work is offloaded onto individuals. IT does not realise it is increasing the work-load of everyone up to four hours a day, but IT is getting its work done.”

Now, just like how Visicalc al-lowed users to free themselves from the constraints of centralised IT, the consumerisation of IT is giving staff the ability to do things far more quickly and produce superior results compared with traditional IT ap-proaches. IT must deal with an in-creasingly tech-savvy user-base.

Losing controlThe old systems were a means for organisations to control how staff work. But in the new world, “It’s harder to lock things down and users are becoming increasingly savvy. Individuals are more important and companies must start supporting them,” says Josh Klein, who co-wrote Hacking Work with Jensen.

“All the innovative companies have totally bizarre practices in place – Google’s 20% [staff dedicate one day per week to their own projects] led to small products like Gmail. The thing is, most companies are not able to take the risks. And it is hard to break down existing structures.” Users are increasingly tech-savvy.

Darko Hrelic, CIO at Gartner, is in the unenviable position of having more than 2,000 CIOs in Gartner who know how to do his job better than he does. He says, “I have no chance of pulling the wool over their eyes. These are people who understand IT.”

People also have better IT at home than they do at work. Westminster Council provides staff with remote access to their PCs using Citrix Ac-cess Gateway. This virtual PC envi-ronment works a bit like GotoMyPC in the consumer market, enabling IT to package up applications securely via two-factor authentication.

David Wilde, CIO at the London borough, says the council allows peo-ple to access Facebook and use Skype. “We opened up access 18 months ago. If people spend too much time [on these sites] it is a man-agement issue, not IT,” he says.

Facebook and Twitter are driving the user interface on corporate appli-cations. In the business-to-consumer market, companies need to respond to consumer trends. So it is no sur-prise that Thetrainline.com has rolled out an iPhone app, driven by business managers asking IT for the application. Within two weeks of going live, the transactional version of the Thetrainline.com iPhone app

Apple in the enterprise

Case study: RaboBank, Netherlands

was contributing 1% of the compa-ny’s business. “It already has one mil-lion users,” says David Jack, CIO of Thetrainline.com. “The iPhone app has stickiness.”

People download the app onto their phones, use it and receive auto-matic updates. On the web it is easy for people to choose a different serv-ice, but the app becomes the first point of call for anyone looking for

train times. In this context IT is an enabler for business development. The consumerisation of IT has given the business an opportunity – a new channel to market. “My business people are very tech savvy. They know that it is possible to build an application. They want to be shown how it can be done,” says Jack.

The waterfall method of software development cannot keep pace with

this. By the time a formal specifica-tion is ready, Apple may well have released a new iPhone, or there is a new hot gadget consumers are lusting over. So Thetrainline.com adopts an agile-like approach to software devel-opment, says Jack.

“It’s an absolute requirement to be agile because we do not know what the end product will be and we have to start small.” ■

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Keep taking the tablets

Intel and AMD systems-on-a-chip set to cut cost of rich media computingOne way or another, integrated chipsets ruled the roost at CES 2011, as Computer Weekly’s reporters discovered

mobile devices

Low-cost computing has come a step closer, with leading chipmakers Intel and AMD both offering

processors that combine multiple PC systems on a single chip.

System-on-a-chip (SoC) technol-ogies should enable PC makers to cut the price of hardware and portable devices, such as tablets, that can run PC software. Experts predict that the chipsets could also lead to low-cost mobile PCs with better battery life.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011) in Las Vegas, AMD unveiled its Fusion family of accelerated processing units (APUs) to power next-generation HD netbooks. The Fusion chip combines on a single die design a multi-core CPU (x86), a DirectX 11-capable graphics and parallel processing engine, a dedicated high-definition video acceleration block, and a high-speed bus.

AMD said that tablets and em-bedded designs based on Fusion APUs would be available from the first quarter of 2011. New features include stutter-free HD video playback and all-day battery life.

Rick Bergman, senior vice-presi-dent and general manager of AMD Products Group, said, “In one major step, we enable users to ex-perience HD everywhere as well as personal supercomputing capa-bilities in notebooks that can de-liver all-day battery life.”

Also previewed at the show was Intel’s second-generation Core processor family, formerly code-named Sandy Bridge. While ini-tially targeting consumer PCs, the chipset will find its way into the enterprise eventually, allowing business users to run high-defini-tion videos and presentations.

Andrew Buss, service director at Freeform Dynamics, said corpo-rates would be slower to move to

the new chipset than consumers. “This is a significant upgrade,” he said. “In the long term this is the solution enterprises will go to once the platform has been validated.”

Buss warned that IT depart-ments would be challenged by validating changes, ensuring oper-ating system support and intro-ducing applications to exploit the chipset’s features. “Enterprises need to wait for it to be stable and mature before rolling it out on a large scale,” he added.

Windows everywhereIn his keynote address at CES, Mi-crosoft chief executive Steve Ballmer highlighted that the next version of Windows would be the first to run on ARM chips. Win-dows 8 will support SoC ARM-based systems from partners NVidia, Qualcomm and Texas In-struments, as well as Intel and AMD x86 systems.

“This announcement is really all about enabling a new class of hardware and new silicon part-ners for Windows,” Ballmer said.

He added that Windows had the breadth, depth and flexibility to deliver the next generation of de-vices through the innovation of Microsoft’s partners.

Adam Leach, principal analyst at Ovum, said the move to ARM’s SoC showed Microsoft’s commit-ment to developing tablet devices.

“This is an important step,” he said. “The penetration of ARM in mobile devices means the ARM chipset is essential [to Microsoft].

“Rather than wait for Moore’s Law, Microsoft is making sure it is pushing forward and moving lower into smaller devices. It is being proactive in targeting small-er devices,” he said.

But Leach warned businesses would have to wait for the bene-fits. “The lead time is quite long,” he said. “For enterprise users to use the mobile chipset or operat-ing system, they will have to wait for manufacturers and software support. It will take two years to be productive, to ensure the soft-ware is integrated and wrapped up in a product.” ■


Tablet computers were the stars of the Consumer Electronics Show - see panel (right)

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Heroes or villains? Employees who use their own kit to work smarter IT's role is changing from one of controlling access to equipment and software, to risk management, says Forrester Research

The first and most obvious place that empowered managers and IT come into conflict is on corporate PCs

and smartphones. What sorts of tech-nologies should employees be able to use in their workplaces? Is it accept-able to use devices, applications, and websites that aren’t sanctioned by the company? Let’s analyse this from the perspective of the three groups in the Hero Compact – empowered users, their managers, and IT.

IT people have a strong incentive to block application downloads, block access to many types of web-sites (including social networks), and to stop mobile devices from connect-ing to corporate systems. People could be downloading viruses. They could create desktop configurations that IT can’t support and that inter-fere with corporate applications. Their applications use up corporate bandwidth. It’s simplest to ban these activities. Managers, too, may decide their workers will be wasting time and productivity.

The problem, from the end user’s point of view, is that many of the best customer-facing ideas require use of these online resources and access to these sites. Would Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt have come up with the idea for Blue Shirt Nation if they hadn’t used Facebook?

As Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the strategy executive who helped revi-talise IBM, puts it, “If you are in an organisation where people don’t par-ticipate in the social media discus-sion both externally and internally, it slows everything down.”

It’s awfully hard to develop projects around tools such as social networks, video and mobile devices if you can’t even use them at work.

consumer electronics


What’s in it for the workers?

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Don’t rush to judgement more onlineVideo: How can social networking be an integral part

of a company’s IT strategy?computerweekly.com/241378.htm

Why do councils block social media sites? asks Socitm

computerweekly.com/237423.htm

How to prevent security breaches from personal

devices in the workplacecomputerweekly.com/244377.htm

Both sides of this argument have justification. Here’s where we come down: companies should block as lit-tle as possible, but IT, managers and employees should work together to manage risk and explore alternatives.

How prevalent is do-it-yourself technology in the workplace?

We asked people to tell us about their use of technology at work. Of the slightly more than 10,000 people in our survey, 4,364 were information workers – people who work with a computer. This includes administra-tive staff, call centre workers, shop floor staff and cashiers, along with traditional office workers.

More than one in three of the work-ers in our survey used do-it-yourself technology. More than 10% used smartphones, and of those, the major-ity provided the phone themselves. About one in seven were download-ing applications to work computers.

But the biggest self-provisioned technology is websites that employ-ees use that aren’t sanctioned by IT. The most popular sites among work-ers in the US, Canada, and the UK were sites with productivity tools such as Google Docs and social net-working sites such as LinkedIn.

IT and management at your com-pany need to decide which sites and behaviours need to be blocked. But you might need to think a little broadly about the benefits, and figure out if there is the equivalent of a free, necessary technology such as Skype in use at your own company.

Finally, consider this. Blocking every potentially dangerous site is pretty much impossible, especially when people are using mobile phone browsers. You’re better off keeping an

eye on this technology and how peo-ple use it, rather than trying to squash it. The more you block, the more you send the message “We don’t trust you with new technologies”. It’s difficult to get people to innovate when this is what they’re hearing. ■

An edited excerpt from Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler’s book Empowered. Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Copyright 2010 Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler. All rights reserved.

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The consumer is increasingly king – even when it comes to business The line between business and consumer comms technology is becoming ever more blurred, reports Rob Bamforth

There is increasing expectation that employees will be able to extend their personal equipment preferences to the workplace

I t was once the case that many IT and communications technolo-gies were initially used exclu-sively for business purposes,

until the increasing usage volumes reduced cost enough for consumer use, even if to begin with it was only for those with technology as an inter-est or hobby.

This has changed dramatically as consumers have embraced technolo-gy in all aspects of their lives: to con-trol appliances, for navigation, to ac-cess information and for social interaction.

The business view of technology as something that sits in an office or study has shifted to a much more cas-ual, lifestyle-based, “use anywhere” expectation.

While functionality has remained important to those with a technical interest, mass-market consumers pre-fer simpler-to-use, and increasingly stylish, products.

Consumers choose technology products in the same way as other items; they are influenced by brand awareness, status, peer pressure, fit-ness for purpose and cost.

There is an increasing expectation that they will be able to extend these

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Consumers see value in being connected to friends, family and increasingly to applications, media and information

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personal preferences to the work-place.

Traditional suppliersMany consumer brands are appear-ing alongside those of existing busi-ness IT and communications provid-ers, and even the more traditional suppliers have become much more consumer aware.

The consumer segments having most impact on the enterprise are mobile devices – especially smart-phones – and internet-based services – especially those oriented around messaging and social networking.

The growing consumer appetite for mobile phone services seems unde-terred by tariff costs, and the growth in adoption of smartphones, in par-ticular, shows that device costs are not a huge issue either.

These costs are high, but consum-ers see value in being connected to friends, family and increasingly to applications, media and information.

Social media, in particular, has hit a nerve and creates opportunities for businesses to reach and interact with their customers. Furthermore, high-speed fixed broadband and “all you can eat” data plans for mobile devic-es have allowed consumers to take advantage of rich media and video has become hugely popular.

As these consumer behaviours migrate into the enterprise, they cre-ate improved opportunities for com-munication and collaboration as employees, especially those digital natives brought up with technology, comfortably use a mixture of meth-ods and media.

For example, conferencing through the web and video has become a much more acceptable experience.

Some consumer applications have crept in through the back door, such as Skype, and, while not formally en-dorsed, will have further encouraged communications at a grass roots level without increasing costs.

There is also potential for further managed cost reductions as, if em-ployees bring their own consumer de-vices into the organisation, it reduces the cost of supply to the business.

Since employees will be more mo-tivated to look after their own devic-es, it reduces some security risks, al-

though the possibility of there being wider options will increase complex-ity and therefore other costs.

If not controlled or monitored, this tide of consumer products and serv-ices will also have a significant, ad-verse impact.

There are issues that the telecoms industry has to face up to, in order to provide capacity as well as coverage when mobile users are relying on a diverse mix of mobile applications and devices.

While content and social media providers are driving up demand and usage, it is the infrastructure provid-ers that are being squeezed.

Employees may welcome some of their social connections and consum-er applications on the devices they carry, but will have to guard against being too distracted by fun activities when they need to be working.

They may also find that their preferred device limits their access to

more onlineWhitepaper: The consumer mobile device in the enterprise


In depth: Embrace IT consumerisation


News: Expect slow adoption of Intel chips


enterprise applications, due to either not being supported by application providers, or by restrictions imposed by their own management.

Cost implicationsConsumer behaviours used in some business scenarios will prove costly, not only from lost productivity, but also increased and unbounded costs, such as the use of mobile data while travelling abroad.

The organisation will need to re-tain some control, and that will need some acceptance from employees.

The line between corporate device or service and “other” has been blurred, and this will complicate the management procedures at both tech-nical and human levels.

New policies will need to be drawn up, that provide enough con-trol to the organisation, and accepta-ble freedom to the employee.

Organisations have to recognise their boundaries are increasingly po-rous, and just as they have to protect data assets from leaking out, they have to deal with consumer elements coming in. A barrier saying “no” will not ultimately work, and in the short term might have an adverse effect on employee morale.

A far better approach is to accept that consumer devices and services will be used by employees on official activities and during working hours,

Consumers choose technology products in the same way as other items; they are influenced by brand awareness, status, peer pressure, fitness for purpose and cost

and to ensure that this is done in as controlled a manner as possible.

This means understanding which consumer attributes employees value the most, and then setting out poli-cies to bring as many of these as pos-sible into an effective working tech-nology environment.

This could be based on trust, but it is early days in the process, and it would be far better if organisations measured and monitored usage pat-terns, so that policies can be adapted where suitable and so that controls can be applied where necessary. ■

Rob Bamforth is principal analyst at Quocirca

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