Essential guide to social media and consumerisation in the enterprise

Martin Courtney reveals how both users and CIOs are shaping social business and bring-your-own-device strategies

To date, the use of social media in business has focused primarily on the sales and marketing side. A global survey by office space solutions firm Regus in June 2011 found that 41 per cent of UK firms were using social media to engage with existing and potential customers, with a third spending up to 20 per cent of their entire marketing budget on social media projects.

This year, however, social media is predicted to infiltrate all areas of business as a new generation of workers brought up using social networking sites look to use similar platforms to collaborate and communicate with colleagues and business partners at work. And increasingly senior executives are keen to use internal social media platforms - which usually include blogging tools, wikis, some form of feedback platform and voting mechanisms - to get the most out of their employees and ease collaboration and decision making.

"It [consumerisation of IT] is part of it, but when you talk to business leaders they recognise they are only using 20-30 per cent of their employees' talent, and they need new ways to get the kind of agility, speed, responsiveness and innovation to exploit those," Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research at Gartner told Computing. "What is driving it more is the need for new answers to new questions - how to increase levels of customer engagement, grow the business in a down market and identify the innovation we should be investing in."

IT leaders are increasingly amenable to the idea of deploying social business tools, according to Ewen Anderson, managing director at consultancy Centralis.

"It [social media] is starting to come in more at the CIO level, who are beginning to challenge the internal pre-conception that it is a waste of everyone's time," he says.

"It has been locked out and stamped on in the past, but companies make it an integral part of their marketing strategy and then an integral part of their job. In the public sector, for example, we see CIOs output their work through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn."

Pioneers in the public sector

Some government organisations are indeed leading the way, with the Patient Opinion site being a good example. This is an experience feedback platform for health services used by the NHS and Westminster City Council that harnesses YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to raise awareness of healthcare issues and shape policy.

Elsewhere, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) is using social media to support Ideas Street, a pretend stock market for new ideas that employees can back with virtual money. The Civil Service, meanwhile, has developed a social media platform called the Civil Service Live Network, which includes a Civil Wiki, Civil Blog and a twitter-type application called Civil Talk.

Private-sector organisations are not far behind. For example, computer games giant Electronic Arts uses mass collaboration platforms to unify decision makers across 29 different offices.

Another example is international cement manufacturer CEMEX, which in 2010 created an internal social media platform called Shift based on IBM's Connections platform, but inspired by the interactions and social communications seen in Facebook and Twitter. The aim of Shift was to share knowledge and expertise through wikipages, employee blogs and open discussion forums among employees in 100 different countries.

Elsewhere, Dublin-based chip manufacturer XiLinx says it saw a 25 per cent improvement in engineer productivity when it allowed staff to share and participate in design processes using internal social media platforms.

Meanwhile, a recent eight-year agreement between Tesco and Microsoft will also see the retail giant's staff use SharePoint, Exchange and Lync to set up a new global collaboration platform, designed to allow employes to find specialist skills and share knowledge.

All in all, it is hard to tell if the rise of social business tools is a symptom of consumerisation in IT or simply a manifestation of in-house software developers copying the successful ideas of public social media applications. Whatever the driver, there is evidence the trend is reaping tangible rewards: a 2011 report from management consultancy firm McKinsey suggested that companies that use social media, or collaborative Web 2.0 technologies, are achieving higher profits.

Specifically, McKinsey found that fully networked businesses had more fluid information flows, deploy staff more flexibly to deal with problems and allow more junior employees to influence or make business decisions. It also noted that applying Web 2.0 technologies to interactions with customers and business partners had a correlation with self-reported market share gains.

Mass mobility presents IT challenges

The so-called consumerisation of IT has been creeping up on businesses since the first Psion Organiser in 1984. In the intervening years, the number of executives hassling their IT departments to port company data and applications onto their gadgets steadily grew. Then, with the arrival of smartphones, this gradual trend became a full-on phenomenon.

Gartner has predicted that companies are now facing “mass mobility”, with sales of smartphones set to reach 645 million units in 2012.

Statistics compiled by YouGov and Research Now last summer, sponsored by software giant Citrix, suggested that a quarter of the world’s small businesses are now using personal smartphones and tablets for work.

“The younger generation has an expectation of mixing personal and work – they expect to have a touch-enabled, always-on device of choice,” says Ewen Anderson, managing director of consultancy firm Centralis.

Who’s driving consumerisation?

A survey last year by consultancy Cap Gemini and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Centre for Digital Business of 160 people working for 50 $1bn corporations, found that the charge towards greater use of mobile devices is being driven by the boardroom rather than by employees.

“An assumption we have is that with Generation Y the consumerisation of IT would create a bottom up groundswell to force change, but we found zero companies like that,” Cap Gemini consultant and report contributor Didier Bonnet told Computing.

“There is a lot of activity which sees new technologies bypassing firewalls but none was sufficient to transform the business. It is a top-down exercise, which ultimately needs leadership from the CIO and the board, though it does help if you have an average employee age of 27 familiar with all this. Pressure from employees did exist, but it was only cited by 30 per cent of respondents.”

But while the drivers behind the greater penetration of mobile devices into corporate environments are uncertain, and in truth are likely to differ from one organisation to the next, the outcome for the IT department is the same – mounting pressure to support and manage a wide variety of different models, operating systems and applications. Of those polled by Gartner’s survey, 74 per cent said they already supported iPhone and Android smartphones on a personal basis, while bring-your-own devices schemes are growing in popularity.

“Ten to 15 years ago you got this laptop and that was it, but there has been almost a societal change where individuals expect to bring their own smartphones and other devices and be able to attach them to the network,” says Stephen Midgley, vice president of global marketing and product at Absolute Software, a company which sells software that segregates business and personal data and applications on iPhones and other devices running Apple’s iOS operating system.

“That is a challenge for the IT department from a support and cost point of view and what we are seeing is many organisations transferring the cost of ownership back to employees – if they want to use the iPhone, they have to bear the cost of data plans and monthly fees. What is interesting is that end users appear willing to pay those fees, they feel their own devices are better equipped.”

Security also remains a big issue. IT departments need to be wary of an accountability divide – whereby they are charged with protecting the integrity of corporate data but not the devices that carry that data.

“People have an assumption that a device will just work and it should be able to connect to anything without them having to do anything, so the expectations of the user is going up fairly dramatically,” says Centralis’ Anderson. “But it is about drawing boundaries about what the IT department is responsible for and what it is not.”

Make sure there’s a solid business case

CIOs also need to be certain that allowing staff to use their own equipment has a positive impact in terms of either increasing personal productivity, or perhaps more significantly, transforming a business process.

“We interviewed two insurance companies which were using iPads, but one was only using it for sales people who could access product listings, pricing and generally static information – it was just a jazzy display for the customers but did not actually change the process,” said CapGemini’s Bonnet.

“Compare that with the other insurance customers which integrated the mobile front end with the entire back office so the customer could sign the contract on the spot, devolving the information and the authority to run the business.”

How consumerisation fuels cloud uptake

At first glance it is hard to see the role that cloud computing plays within the wider consumerisation trend within enterprise IT. But findings of several surveys conducted in 2011 suggest that as many as one in five individual employees and/or business departments have signed up to public cloud services without informing their company IT departments, in the sometimes justifiable belief that this is the quickest and easiest way to access the resources they need to do their jobs.

Another aspect of consumerisation in IT – the increasing use of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices – is also driving the adoption of cloud services.

A report from research company TNS commissioned by systems integrator CSC found that 33 per cent of more than 3,600 respondents worldwide said they had moved applications and services into the cloud to ensure mobile employees can stay connected to the enterprise via a range of devices.

To a certain extent Apple has shown the way. Its iCloud and the App Store services are being emulated not only by other cloud service provider but also corporate IT departments as they explore new ways of hosting data and distributing software to employees equipped with multiple types of devices.

Launched in June 2011, the iCloud lets consumers store their files within the cloud from where they can be downloaded onto any iOS-based device, be it an iPhone, iPad or MacBook.

The concept has been seized upon by other IT vendors, which believe it can be harnessed as a method of hosting company information separately from devices and applications, and downloading it in a controlled way, with various security mechanisms in place to protect data integrity and privacy.

“The majority of our clients are trying to isolate the apps from the data and deliver them as services, which is the nirvana we all sought 20 years ago through web or some sort of virtual gateway,” says Ewen Anderson, managing director at consultancy Centralis.

Apple’s App Store, the Android Marketplace and similar services are giving end users a taste of how easy it can be to install new applications, prompting some corporate IT departments to rethink their strategy around software deployments and upgrades.

Stephen Midgley, vice president of product at iPad software company Absolute Software, says the his firm’s customers are increasingly creating their own proprietary apps for devices such as the iPad, for example, a trend that is changing the evolution of IT and how corporates disseminate software.

“With the iPad, if you want content from the BBC the chances are you are less likely to visit the website directly and more likely to have a specialised BBC app on the device itself,” he says. “So by default these apps are changing how the consumer and the next generation of worker engage and get their information.”

James Thomas, IT director at University College London Hospital, says that his IT department will almost certainly have to develop clinical software specifically for devices like the iPad as more staff bring their own devices onto the premises. He is also looking closely at the App Store model to see if a similar proposition could be set up internally.

“We would never have thought we would be looking at Apple and saying ‘Do you know what, they are actually helping us control this world’,” says Thomas. “That [Apple App Store] is probably what you would engineer if you were starting from scratch anyway, giving yourself the ability to say to people you do not have to have all these apps, but as you go through your job and there is something you cannot do, have a look at this store and if we have got it, you can download it and use it. There is a real issue if the IT department has to push applications into thousands of desktops in a certain window, but if you could just post the app up somewhere and tell users where to go if they want it, that is so much easier and takes a lot of cost out of the business as well.”