Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You – Part 1, Gartner Report

Part 1: Closing the experience gap

Challenges abound for both the CIO and the IT organization. The trend of having to do more with less to a skills shortage to dealing with an increasingly mobile world. That’s just scratching the surface, and now, based upon a new report from Gartner entitled “Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You,” users of Enterprise technology are dissatisfied with internal applications and tools. As stated by Gartner, there is an “Experience Gap” between the applications they use in their personal lives and those used in the workplace.

Two major challenges identified by Gartner report

1) Employees (internal users) see a gap between the technology they use in their personal lives, the technology and application provided to customers and the applications available internally to help them do their “work.”

2) CIOs and the IT organization, specifically those groups creating, delivering and supporting internal applications, view consumerization and corporate technology as two distinct and separate entities. Not only is there a perception difference, but internally, consumerization represents both an increase in cost and risk to the enterprise.

For employees, although there is an understanding of some of the challenges faced by their internal IT, there is a growing gap between the experience of using technology within their work life and their personal life. The tools, applications and services available at work look and work differently. At work, they are less mobile, less connected and much less social, completely the opposite from how applications work in our personal lives. While customers interact with the same organization in a vastly different way. It’s frustrating and employees are becoming less tolerant living within this experience gap.

For the CIO and the IT groups, the challenge is not just balancing the need for a new user experience, it is also balancing the need to remain within corporate security guidelines, manage a decreasing budget and follow an increasingly complex user computing environment. Gartner states the following:

“IT leaders tend to think of consumerization in very literal terms. They see it as a manifestation of a unique segment that is distinct from the enterprise technology segment. With this dichotomy drawn, consumerization is seen as a cost and risk management problem that needs to be solved through increased compliance and oversight, coupled with minor concessions to employees.”

IT focus on external over internal users

Simply put. IT is focused on consumerizing customers interactions, not employees interactions with internal technology during their work hours. For the most part and based upon the mounting challenges, IT is forced to focus more on supporting the business, rather than supporting the internal workforce.

Through the rest of this blog series (links found below), we will be sharing additional insights from the Gartner report. At EasyVista, we have witnessed this problem grow over the past few years and believe there is a way to consumerize both external and internal applications. We also have spent the last few years building tools for the IT organization to operate more efficiently and provide a richer and engaging user experience – beyond IT services and across the entire enterprise.

Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You – Part 2, Gartner Report

Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You – Part 3, Gartner Report

Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You – Part 4, Gartner Report