The modern workforce, part I: supporting productivity with mobile, BYOD, and cloud

1. Summary

This report is the first in a series of three that analyzes the results of two global surveys: one of the vanguard of the modern workforce (workers ages 18 to 34) and one of IT professionals.

• What the modern workforce thinks it needs to succeed in this rapidly changing world of mobile-first communications and new work-collaboration technologies
• How IT is supporting those needs and overall corporate objectives
• If there are gaps between worker expectations and IT requirements, and how technology buyers can address them

Gigaom Research’s objective is to give technology decision-makers better insights into how their workforce is evolving so they can make them more successful and align people and technologies with corporate objectives. Both IT and functional management can benchmark themselves against the mainstream and against the leading edge of fast movers.

Key findings include:

• Overall, IT departments are doing a solid job of supporting the communication and collaboration preferences specified by the modern workforce. Workers surveyed said their companies supported their top three preferred means of collaboration, and, in fact, IT was ahead of demand in supporting critical collaboration tools like productivity software and intranets.
• Workers also said their companies supported their preferred mobile business applications, including email, file syncing, and conferencing. However, although IT decision-makers we surveyed were enthusiastic about the cloud and the bring-your-own-everything world, some gaps between worker preference and IT support appeared in bring your own device (BYOD).
• The survey suggested that IT professionals are now turning their attention toward collaboration outside the company at a rapid pace, after 59 percent stated they had changed the tools for internal company communication and collaboration in the past year.
• A group of fast-moving IT departments represent the leading edge; they are more deeply engaged in mobile, cloud, BYOD, and new communications and collaboration techniques across the board. These fast movers represented 13 percent of the IT respondents we surveyed.
• Workforce adoption of some of the newer work technologies lags IT provisioning, suggesting that factors outside the IT department could be a barrier. Companies should create cross-functional task forces to evaluate the intersection of these technologies with worker productivity.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Ryan McVay/Thinkstock.