Consumerization of IT in the workplace

There is an inevitability of consumerization of IT. The study On the benefits of consumer IT in the workplace - An IT empowerment perspective shows that it does not matter the company policy or stance on consumerization, it is going to happen and the company can only decide how they choose to deal with the matter. Although the papers discuss the pros and cons of consumerization, in effect companies do not choose if the pros outweigh the cons or not, but rather how they can mitigate the cons and amplify the pros of consumerization, for their unique context.

To begin with I think it is interesting to note, when we asked our tutorial class they generally preferred a gadget budget. (Their response to a poll asking them to rank their preferred management strategy is shown below. The score is calculated by giving the strategy ranked number 1 six points, number 2 five points and so on and so forth.)

However, gadget budgets can be difficult for companies to implement as it requires the company to continuously update the list of approved gadgets. It also raise the problem as pointed out by instructor that employees might feel frustration is they are continuously rejected and feel like they have no way to use the budget allocated to them, making it irrelevant. Hence, I propose that instead of having a hard and fast list, companies can instead have some requirements (e.g. allow for end-to-end encryption) with possible suggestions of gadgets that fit, but also allow employees to propose new gadgets and if approved populate the list accordingly.

The second one was segmenting employees by role, this is likely popular because we recognize that generally different job functions have different needs and requirements, and most would want something that suits their role well. Companies can and should as far as possible include interested employees in the process of deciding standards for each role. The employees would know what their role requires best, and being able to have a hand in shaping the standards can also make employees feel more empowered and respected. However, the drawback of this strategy is that it brings the difficulty for companies to maintain many different sets of standards for different roles. Additionally, if certain personnel take on multiple roles, it might be difficult to determine what standard should apply to them. This strategy might only be suitable for companies with clear distinction of roles and perhaps not too many different roles.

This brings us to our next topic on IT empowerment. Generally, the argument by the paper On the benefits of consumer IT in the workplace seems to be flawed. They were able to find correlations between consumer IT and increased IT empowerment. It is a correlation and not a causation, which means that it could very well be that employees that have IT empowerment use more consumer IT, and hence consumer IT does not actually bring benefit if the employee does not experience IT empowerment already.

They measured perceived innovation work behavior and perceived individual performance, which is very subjective. Moreover, because they are comparing between those with different behavior patterns, some variation in perception is to be expected. Their perception might also not translate into actual performance or productivity for the company.

However, I can anecdotally understand how in some cases consumer IT can be used in innovative way to improve individual work performance. For example, in cases raised by the article about nurses using their phones to take photos of wounds of patients in their care to reduce having to wrap the same wound twice. So, it is not to say that the conclusion does not hold, but that the empirical evidence found does not strongly support the conclusion.

Another interesting thing to note was that it was found that consumer IT was used irregardless of the companies attitude towards it, which once again highlights the inevitability of it. This is inline with the poll we did in class where everyone agreed that being able to bring your own device is at least somewhat important. 

Being able to bring our own device can bring many benefits to the employees, like increased ease of use. However, it could also negatively impact the employees work life balance. Using one’s own device means that employees can be reached at any point in time. This often translates to employees being expected to be reachable at any point in time. Even in cases where companies do not mean to disturb employee personal time, employees sometimes cannot help themselves from checking their email and allowing the pressure of undone work from pressuring them.

Here company culture is important. It is the company’s decision on how they want to approach it. For example, companies like Tesla and Uber pride themselves on working their employees very hard, and expect them to put in a lot of extra effort in their work. For companies that do want to ensure their employees have work-life balance, they can approach it both culturally and technically. It is important that supervisors and managers respect employees boundaries, but also specific technical capabilities can also be included to help reduce the impact consumer IT have on employees work life balance.

Learning from an emailing etiquette I was taught, that if you finish writing an email for someone in the middle of the night, schedule the email to be sent the next morning so that the person will not be disturbed in the middle of the night by the email. Perhaps companies can implement such capabilities, where any emails or messages sent on company communication platforms beyond certain hours will be scheduled for the next morning during working hours. Perhaps, there could be some exceptions where a message can be set to urgent and in that case, the message will be sent immediately. However, in this case this is where the importance of the culture applies, as it is important that such functions are not abused.

In conclusion, consumer IT entering the workplace is a pretty universal phenomenon, it brings a host  of benefits and risks. Companies should tackle the issue with their own unique circumstance in mind. The consumerization of IT should be considered in their overall corporate strategy. Although companies are concerned with security, they should try not to treat consumer IT as an invasion of their corporate space, because the fact that employees want to start bringing it in means it could be becoming more cost effective for the companies to capitalize on.

References:

Harris, J., Ives, B., & Junglas, I. (2012). IT consumerization: When gadgets turn into enterprise IT tools. MIS Quarterly Executive, 11(3), 99–112.

Yun, H., Kettinger, W., & Lee, C. (2012). A new open door: The smartphone’s impact on work-to-life conflict, stress, and resistance. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 16(4), 121–152.
 

Junglas, I., Goel, L., Rehm, S.V. & Ives, B. (2022). On the benefits of consumer IT in the workplace - an IT empowerment perspective