An IDC White Paper sponsored by Nortel
The Hyperconnected: Here They Come! A Global Look at the Exploding ‘Culture of Connectivity’ and Its Impact on the Enterprise
Romina Aducci Pim Bilderbeek Holly Brown Seana Dowling Nora Freedman John Gantz Abner Germanow Takashi Manabe Alex Manfrediz Shalini Verma
May 2008
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Internet, broadband access, camera phones, voice-over-IP, instant messaging, social networking, video uploading – all make obvious the increasing importance of communications and connectivity in our daily lives. But what does all of this connectedness, this addiction to sharing information every moment of every day, mean for businesses and organizations? What decisions will companies have to make to ensure this “connectedness” becomes a competitive advantage? Where are the opportunities and challenges? What are the implications for employees, senior management and CIOs? To answer these questions, Nortel tasked IDC to conduct a global study of almost 2,400 working adults in 17 countries. The study focused on quantifying the state of today’s connectedness, tracking its acceptance and use across devices and applications as well as determining the pace of its growth and impact on the enterprise. Here’s the essence of what we found – enterprises around the world are facing an exploding “culture of connectivity.” Not only is 16% of the global information workforce already “Hyperconnected,” more significantly, another 36% will be joining them soon! This evolution towards increasing levels of connectivity will have a profound impact on enterprises, creating challenges in managing these new tools of connectivity while providing information securely and reliably, and ensuring that this connectivity is productive. So CIOs and IT business managers take note: • Based on the number of respondents in certain clusters and then factoring in the rate of workers entering the workforce and retiring and likely adoption rates – we estimate that the 16% of the total information workforce currently “hyperconnected” may soon increase to 40%.
• The migration to Hyperconnectivity will create a profusion of devices, applications, and new business processes. Already, the average hyperconnected individual uses at least seven devices to access the network and nine connectivity applications. This profusion will create the need for a strategy and architecture for unified communications across the enterprise if an orderly migration is to occur.
• The hyperconnected depend on the devices and applications that make them hyperconnected – 47% said a network outage at work would have an extreme impact on them. Technology supporting the hyperconnected has become mission critical!
• As baby boomers retire, businesses will find themselves competing within today’s hyperconnected base of talent. Is your company ready to compete in the emerging war for talent? Tomorrow’s workforce will increasingly expect to work in a hyperconnected communications environment and many will consider this a condition of employment.
• The boundary between work and personal connectivity for the hyperconnected is almost nonexistent. Two-thirds use text or instant messaging for both work and personal use. More than a third use social networking for both. The freedom to conduct work during personal time will force changes to personal use policies, business practices, training curricula, and IT support policies.
• Connectivity tools in the hands of employees may increase productivity, but they also increase the risk of the release of sensitive information to the outside world. Already a fourth of hyperconnected respondent companies use blogs and
wikis to communicate with customers and other outsiders. Obtaining the benefits and avoiding the risks of Hyperconnectivity will require unprecedented cooperation between CIOs and their business counterparts.
Whether they are creating this Web 2.0 society or the Web 2.0 society is creating them, it is almost certain they, together with those who follow them, will dramatically change the enterprise work environment, perhaps beyond recognition.
It won’t be possible to ignore this new level of connectivity. Businesses can either embrace it and manage it carefully or, stand-by as it enters their enterprise, in a confusion of disconnected deployments that squander the productivity and competitive advantage Hyperconnectivity could otherwise bring.
The nature of this change is the subject of this White Paper. CLASSIFICATION OF THE GENUS In all, IDC surveyed nearly 2,400 men and women in 17 countries in a various industries, company size classes, and age segments. Questions ranged from device and application adoption of technology to location of use, attitudes about connectivity, and assessment of their companies’ effectiveness deploying these new technologies.
WHO ARE THE HYPERCONNECTED? We’ve all seen them from time to time. The teenager in the mall sending text messages to Twitter.com every minute because Facebook isn’t interactive enough. The road warrior in the airport carrying a laptop briefcase in one hand, emailing on a BlackBerry with the other, and talking to the Bluetooth crescent behind his ear. The co-worker with five windows open on her computer screen, instant message pop-ups clamoring for attention like Times Square billboards, an eBay auction underway in the background, and the latest iPhone in her purse.
To identify the hyperconnected we used a statistical technique called cluster analysis to divine correlations from the survey data about device and application adoption. The analysis found four distinct clusters: • Hyperconnected: Those who have fully embraced the brave new world, with more devices per capita than the other clusters and more intense use of new communications applications. They liberally use technology devices and applications for both personal and business use.
Sometimes we don’t see them. The accountant maneuvering his heavy metal avatar in Second Life while talking over Skype to relatives in Asia. The coworker blogging furtively at lunchtime between chats on MySpace because it’s against corporate policy to use company computers for personal uses. The salesman in his car, equipped with the latest Garmin GPS, talking on his hands free phone to a client and using the Garmin to find a Starbucks hot-spot for an email update. Perhaps it’s even you, sneaking a peak at your office email while on vacation.
• Increasingly Connected: Those who are using multiple devices and applications but fewer than the hyperconnected. They use blogs and wikis, but they are half as likely as the hyperconnected to be involved with social networks, a third as likely to use voice over IP (VoIP). • Passive Online: Those who use even fewer devices but are beginning to experiment with some applications, like instant messaging, but aren’t ready for more advanced Web 2.0 applications, like social networking or video conferencing over the Web.
Those (and maybe you) are the hyperconnected – those individuals around us for whom the new world of communicating devices and interactive applications couldn’t come soon enough, the style setters in a new “culture of connectivity.”
• Barebones Users: Those who are online but pretty much stick to email, desktop access to the Internet, and cell phone use for voice calls.
Today, there aren’t too many members of this species. They are a minority of the information workforce – 16% as we measure them in this study – but there is a huge cohort moving in their wake. And, if they are in the workforce, they are in the customer base and partner community.
A cluster analysis looks for correlations first, after which it looks for commonality among cluster members. These commonalities can relate to geography, demographics, gender, behavior, or attitudes. In looking at these commonalities, the bottom two clusters are quite distinct from the
The hyperconnected are the first dwellers in the Web 2.0 society, but they won’t be the last.
Fig. 1
This means that a cohort that is small today, and, as a result, perhaps easier to deal with in the workforce and customer base, will likely become much bigger overnight. An iPhone here, a YouTube there, and all those workers in that big cluster are on their way to being hyperconnected. Even more likely as devices and applications converge. On age alone – by tracking people retiring and young people entering the workforce by cluster – the hyperconnected cohort will be 25% of the total information workforce within a few years. Assume some migration of individuals currently in the “Increasingly Connected” cluster, and we could easily be up to 40%.
hyperconnected cluster. They will use some devices for personal use, and they may grudgingly use email to keep in touch with work or while vacationing, but it can’t be said that they are embracing a Web 2.0 lifestyle.
Enterprises will either manage this migration or get trampled.
Our cluster analysis results revealed the hyperconnected in our sample use a minimum of seven devices for work and personal activities in addition to nine applications. The Increasingly Connected in our sample use four devices and six applications.
The Web may have been invented in Switzerland, and Internet commerce pioneered in the United States, but the quest for personal connectivity has no national boundaries. In fact, the country with the highest percentage of hyperconnected respondents in the study was China, the country with the highest percentage of increased Hyperconnectivity was Russia. Meanwhile, Canada and the United Arab Emirates had the fewest number of the hyperconnected respondents among the 17 countries included in the study.
GLOBAL HYPERCONNECTIVITY
Figure 1 shows the relative size of each cluster and the relative standing of each cluster in the adoption of communicating devices and applications.
Figure 2 shows the percentage for each region that was in the top two connectivity clusters. They are both shown in order to provide insight into the impact on the region as the Increasingly Connected cohort migrates to hyperconnected status.
Look closely at the placement of the clusters. The largest one is detached from the others, as if it’s rising toward the highest, smallest circle. Which it is. The third cluster, however, is distinguished from the hyperconnected cluster only by a matter of degree. Fewer devices, with not as deep a foray into the new communications applications.
Fig. 2
The Hyperconnected The 16% of the information workforce we identified as hyperconnected through our cluster analysis not only a have much higher adoption of communication devices and applications than those in the other clusters, but they also appreciate their companies’ efforts to support their connectivity needs. They are reasonably happy with their work/life balance, even though they use almost all devices and applications for both, and they are willing to communicate with work on vacation, in restaurants, from bed, and even in places of worship. Other characteristics: • They are found in all countries, although higher than average in the U.S. and China • They are found in all industries, but are above the average in banking and high tech industries • They come from all job functions and occupations, but are above the average in IT and research and development functions, lower than average in sales • They come from all levels of the corporate ladder, but are above average in management positions • They can be any age, although 60% are under 35, only 7% over 55 • They can be either male or female, but 60% are male • They have wired homes – 63% have home Wi-Fi versus the average of 40% • They tend to live in urban areas more than the other clusters • They listen to more MP3s and play more networked games than the other clusters • They push the envelope – leading the clusters in adoption of the Amazon Kindle, Apple iPhone, and Slingbox video transmitter • They’d take their laptop out before their wallet or even mobile phone if they had to leave their house for 24 hours • They see Hyperconnectivity as normal with less than a third thinking of themselves as early adopters of technology • They tend to work for companies that are also early adopters and enable their employees to use advanced tools and solutions
What makes one region or country have more hyperconnected workers? That depends on a number of factors, from telecommunications infrastructure quality and coverage to the demographics of the workforce – the workforces in the emerging economies are younger than those in the developed world – to the make up of the country’s industries and the mix of small, medium, and large companies. For instance, worldwide, small companies with less than 100 employees and companies with more than 2,500 had about half the percent of workforce that were hyperconnected than the companies in between. Small companies tend to invest less in technology, while large companies often slowly adopt new technologies. Thus, countries that have a large base of mid-size companies – like China, India, and Germany – had higher numbers of hyperconnected workers. Those with larger numbers of big companies or many small companies – like Mexico and Brazil – had smaller numbers. And while Brazil and Mexico yielded fewer hyperconnected respondents, the study results also suggest there may exist some leapfrogging toward early adoption of innovative technologies among that smaller elite group of information workers.
There are other factors, aside from age of the workforce and the nature of the industrial base, affecting a country’s “culture of connectivity.” Social or work environment also affects it. Urban density among the qualifying workforce – highest in China and Mexico – has an impact, as does acceptance of working during personal time. The percent of respondents willing to send business text messages on vacation varied from 52% in China and 67% in the United Arab Emirates to 11% in Canada and 17% in Japan.
devices and applications are blurring. To support the business use, enterprises may find themselves supporting personal use – with all the attendant security, privacy, and management headaches. Increased mobility will also make it harder for enterprises to monitor the workforce. •
Each country, each region has a different connectivity landscape. But there are two common characteristics to all countries: (1) the inexorable growth of hyperconnected individuals, and (2) therefore the need for enterprises to be on top of this growth if they are to compete in the global marketplace.
The new technologies and applications therefore affect employee work/life balance. 35% of the hyperconnected employees felt their companies’ solutions helped them maintain a work/life balance, but 21% said they made it difficult to maintain a balance. Companies will not only need to develop policies and strategies to help employees find that balance, but may face legal or union issues with merged personal and business activities.
• The hyperconnected expect to work in a rich communication environment and consider the newer solutions as conditions for employment. Companies will find themselves deploying solutions for competitive reasons and keeping needed talent to their customer’s expectations. • The dependency of the hyperconnected on the devices and applications that make them hyperconnected raises the importance of network and application reliability, security, and availability even higher than it is today.
IMPACT ON THE ENTERPRISE
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We’ll get into specifics later, but the behavior and attitudes of this group of hyperconnected individuals indicates change ahead for the enterprise: •
The lines between business use and personal use for
The tools and applications favored by the hyperconnected offer advantages when it comes to collaboration and communication with customers, but they also increase the risk of the inadvertent release of sensitive data and the need to comply with regulations on privacy protection and legal discovery.
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The need for enterprises to support both hyperconnected and non-hyperconnected individuals in their employee and customer bases will beg for the unifying architecture and deployment strategy, served by unified communications solutions, and surely requiring support from supplier partners.
customers. Fifty-nine percent of hyperconnected respondents said their companies used online communities or social networks to reach their customers (versus an average of 38%) and 36% used outbound video podcasts to reach customers and other stakeholders (versus 12%). 25% of hyperconnected respondents said their employers were “early adopters” of technology, versus an average of 15%.
Figure 3 gives just a hint of the pressure the hyperconnected will put on organizations. It looks at the response to the question of what advanced communications capability would the respondent consider “critical” to the acceptance of a new job and compares the hyperconnected to the average respondent.
Which came first? The hyperconnected individual or the company that adopted connectivity solutions early? The answer really doesn’t matter. What does matter is the blueprint these companies set for others that follow. THE BLURRING BETWEEN PERSONAL AND WORK
Fig. 3
One of the most striking – although perhaps not surprising – results of the survey is the degree to which personal connectivity is blending with work connectivity. For most of us reading this White Paper that has already become a reality. Figure 4 shows the degree of combined personal and business use of a select collection of communications devices and applications among the hyperconnected. Fig. 4
We have plotted the difference between the average respondent and the hyperconnected respondent with arrows specifically to indicate that hyperconnected workers are merely the advanced guard for the entire information workforce. Fast Internet access, laptop PC, and mobile phones were entry-level conditions for employees. But the hyperconnected don’t stop there – they are looking for even more including presence (i.e., knowing who is online), Instant Messaging, and rich collaboration. While we asked the question of employees in rating potential employers, could we not also expect similar ratings of customers of their suppliers?
Although we plotted only the hyperconnected, there was a high degree of mixed use for the entire sample for such items as desktop PCs, laptop PC, and mobile phones. The difference between the hyperconnected and the average respondent was a little more pronounced in the applications. For instance, as shown, the hyperconnected showed a 35% overlap in social networking, while the average for the total base was 12%.
There is a feedback loop at work between hyperconnected employees and their companies. The employees are hyperconnected in part because their companies provide the connectivity solutions that make it possible. Their companies, in turn, are more likely to extend that connectivity to
As our hyperconnected cohort gets bigger over the next few years, enterprises will have to come to terms with this overlap. Only 30% of the sample uses social networks at work, compared to the 48% of the hyperconnected. The hyperconnected tell us that 35% of their companies have “click to call” on their web sites and that 26% use virtual worlds in business, compared to 15% and 9%, respectively, for the respondent base as a whole. Accommodating this highbandwidth, hyperconnected traffic will require carrier-grade performance of enterprise networks and force organizations to confront and manage security and privacy issues and support 24/7 operations.
Respondents as a whole, but especially the hyperconnected, connect to business remotely from all manner of locales. A frightening number connect from automobiles – we assume as passengers or while stopped – and a good number while on vacation. Email connectivity was lower from some of these locales, presumably because not everyone has a PDA or carries a laptop to their place of worship. Figure 5 shows the connectivity of hyperconnected respondents compared to the average, again with the arrows indicating that the average will move up in time. Fig. 5
For the enterprise, as the hyperconnected cohort grows, more or less forced march into the deployment and management of these Web 2.0 applications will develop. At the same time, enterprises are exploring business-driven deployment of some of the same capabilities (e.g. targeting highly-mobile executives or field sales and support personnel). Applications that seem experimental or luxuries today, will become mission critical tomorrow. Enterprises have a long history of initial resistance to technologies that eventually became part of corporate life, from personal computers and desktop publishing to email and local area networks. Even today many CIOs still have reservations about Wi-Fi and instant messaging. How will they react to letting employees blog to the world, to managing avatars in virtual worlds, to scheduling web conferencing facilities, and to storing and managing an explosion of videos and images, to letting customers interact with their CRM systems with PDAs? How will they cope with the need to manage, store, and back up information that may include personal information?
For the enterprise, this mobile access poses a dilemma. Other research by IDC indicates that enterprises see mobility as a great way to grow revenues by allowing more untethered access to customers and to increase productivity through better internal collaboration.
Savvy CIOs see these issues clearly. But these CIOs also work in complex environments, support myriad internal clients with varying agendas, and have a million other issues to deal with, all claiming priority. Moving forward will take planning, business unit support, and more than likely outside help.
But as more and more workers connect remotely, more and more corporate email systems and VPNs will need to incorporate support for multiple form factors, face the possibility of lost or compromised data, and contend with personal traffic on networks and back-up servers. Yet, if the enterprise doesn’t accommodate this mobility, it will lose the productivity, morale, and even market share gains it would otherwise enjoy by equipping its remote workers with tools they need to work offsite while losing the loyalty of customers stuck with fixed access only.
ALWAYS ON, ALWAYS AVAILABLE The promise has always been that new technologies would allow communications “anywhere, anytime.” But today the reality seems to be the phrase has morphed into “everywhere, all the time.”
NOT JUST MOBILE, BUT INTERACTIVE, TOO
customer support. Interactivity won’t be contained in a single application, as it is now.
It’s hard enough to manage mobile devices in an enterprise setting, but there is another facet of connectivity that will make it even more difficult. Interactivity.
MISSION CRITICAL CONNECTIVITY
Figure 6 plots the growth of business emails worldwide – person-to-person emails only – compared to a rough estimate of business instant messages sent in one day. As the survey data have already shown, hyperconnected individuals are addicted to the instant gratification of IM and text messaging. The rest of the clusters aren’t far behind.
The importance of these advanced communications technologies can be seen in what respondents say about their dependency on them. When we asked respondents which of four items they would take if they had to leave the house for 24 hours and could only take one – the mobile phone came in number one, followed by wallet, laptop PC, keys, and iPod. (The hyperconnected opted for the laptop PC ahead of the even the mobile phone!)
Fig. 6
Figure 7 shows a few measures by which enterprises can gauge the importance of certain capabilities to their workers and customers and the implication of outages. We didn’t bother plotting the importance of dial-up Internet (falling), landline phones (flat), or Internet and broadband access at work, which should be considered a given. Respondents were also realistic on the impact of outages – they affected them more in their business lives (see Figure 7) than in personal lives. Fig. 7 For CIOs running enterprise networks interactivity just adds complexity to managing mobile communications. While messaging doesn’t add much strain on network capacity – most messages are only a few kilobytes – it does add pressure to keep networks running and, if messages are stored or archived in any manner, creates demands for security and recoverability. If messages aren’t stored, then the enterprise may face issues with e-discovery and compliance with laws and regulations. And messaging is just the first baby step on the way to the richer, more sophisticated Web 2.0 applications our hyperconnected individuals have already adopted. IDC expects that “presence” – the ability to know who’s online at any point in time – will be built into enterprise applications, like sales force automation, product lifecycle management, and
The ratings reinforce the idea that the enterprise has to be cognizant of the extracurricular needs of their workers. The CIO can’t force a hotel or airport to install Wi-Fi, but the travel department can route mobile workers to hotels that do,
and the IT department can arrange for roaming agreements with Wi-Fi hot spots.
Enterprises will need to run, not walk, into the Web 2.0 world, and, with their methodical deployment and corporateclass security and management, transform it into Web 3.0.
The impact of network outages is not something any CIO needs to be told about. However, the ramifications of all of these mobile devices and mobile users working with increasingly media rich and interactive data types, does have an impact on the CIO’s ability to guarantee uptime.
Figure 9 shows the variation of Web 2.0 and messaging adoption by region. The lack of differentiation between developed countries and emerging countries in the survey responses illustrates the global nature of the “culture of connectivity.”
WEB 2.0 INROADS
Fig. 9
Our survey found significant adoption of Web 2.0 applications in the enterprise, as shown in Figure 8, which plots the propensity of respondents to use these new applications for business. Again we have plotted the hyperconnected in comparison to the average respondent, and again we use the arrows to depict upward migration over time. Fig. 8
GETTING TO WEB 3.0 If Web 2.0 is the use of Internet-borne applications like blogging, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds, Internet voice and video, and rich media sharing, then Web 3.0 has to be the use of these applications by enterprises in production settings. Given the many levels and degrees it’s possible to enhance connectivity in the thousands of business processes and applications in the enterprise, there is no single or standard way to emigrate to Web 3.0.
There is another dimension here that is not plotted – and that’s the degree to which respondents use these applications for personal use.
But there are some guideposts. Our hyperconnected respondents, who are hyperconnected in part because their companies help them to be so, tell us their companies are already busy deploying Web 2.0 applications in commercial settings. They use social networks to reach their customers and suppliers, send automated text messages as orders to suppliers, and connect branch offices with VoIP.
So we have double pressure on the enterprise to migrate to the next generation of Internet innovation – often referred to as Web 3.0: (1) upward migration into the hyperconnected cluster and (2) familiarity with the application in employees’ and customers’ personal lives. Web access, instant messaging, and Wi-Fi were personal applications before they migrated into business settings.
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Figure 10 gives us a view of how just one Web 2.0 application — social networks — is being deployed out there today. The companies employing the hyperconnected workers we polled are ahead of the pack, but there is enough deployment in the other clusters to prove the viability of the application. This is no longer rocket science, no longer the province of pioneers.
Fig. 11
Fig. 10
In the survey we asked respondents an open ended question that speaks to the never ending quest for more connectivity. It was this: If you could access a truly high-speed mobile broadband network – say as fast as a home DSL or cable modem connection – what would you do new or different in the way you communicate? The answer was basically more, and more often. In response after response, the answer was check email more often, contact home more often, work faster, spend more time online, be more efficient, communicate more often, and so on. Pick up the pace, and be happier doing it.
Our respondents even told us what they like and don’t like about their companies’ communications solutions.
Is that all they want?
Oddly, what they appreciated in one place (systems easy to use) they often didn’t in others (systems hard to use). These are shown in Figure 11. We only show the rankings of the hyperconnected, but the rankings were similar to the average respondent, although the percents varied. Look within Figure 11, and you’ll see some of the threads we have talked about. The way the new connectivity allows for instant access to others – yet engenders more interruption. The way the new connectivity lets you be in touch when you are home, which may allow you to be home more – and the way you may now feel compelled to work during personal time. The way the systems are fast and reliable, but never fast and reliable enough.
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THE NEED FOR A UNIFYING THEME
conferencing – are generally key components of unified communications solutions. Corral these applications into a single system, and it will be a lot easier to manage the rest.
This relentless increase in connectivity in the enterprise bespeaks a proliferation of devices and applications, accompanied by new business processes and policies.
By integrating email and voice mailboxes, supporting instant messaging and conferencing in a way that they can link to corporate applications, and supporting web based telephony, these solutions can not only improve productivity but save money on hardware and software that previously supported duplicate functions. Nortel itself saved $12 million a year by implementing unified communications, with an investment payback in less than a year.
These, in turn, will create pressure for a unified approach, an enterprise-wide strategy and architecture. If every department can implement Web 2.0 applications its own way, to its own standard, the resulting incompatibilities and inefficiencies across the enterprise will erase any department-level benefits.
But a unifying strategy and the deployment of unified communications will probably not be enough. Most enterprises will need to work in partnership with their suppliers like Nortel to be successful.
With an enterprise-wide strategy and architecture comes the opportunity to take advantage of unified communications solutions, like those offered by Nortel, that can tie disparate pieces together. Look again at Figure 8. The highest used applications – Voice over IP, Instant Messaging, and Web
Industry Differences Hyperconnectivity varies by industry, from 9% of respondents from health care to 25% in high tech industries and 21% in finance industries. But the differences even out if you add the second cohort, the highly connected to the mix. These represent potential hyperconnected individuals. The pattern of Web 2.0 adoption by industry, as shown by the second figure, is similar to that for Hyperconnectivity, but doesn’t match exactly. This may be because of differences by industry in the need to use these applications to reach customers or enable sales forces, or for other intrinsic reasons, such as the degree to which company activities take place at multiple sites or existing degree of penetration of traditional devices, like laptops. Regardless, even the least penetrated industry has enough Web 2.0 activity and Hyperconnectivity to matter. The benefits of this activity and connectivity may vary by industry, based on usage, but the challenges will be uniform. CIOs in all industries will need to respond to the same call to action to (1) goad the organization into developing an enterprise strategy and policies (2) manage the technical environment, (3) create a unifying architecture to deploy connectivity and Web 2.0 across the entire organization, and (4) find and work with reliable partners, like Nortel, to help with this forward migration. Fig. 8
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THE CALL TO ACTION
formal corporate support for new devices and applications because of the additional stress on the network and the number of devices involved, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Corporate networks may at first be tested and strained by hyperconnected workers, suppliers and customers, but over time network prowess will become a corporate success factor.
What we have learned about the state of Hyperconnectivity today, its pace of adoption, and its observable impact on organizations suggests a clear call to action. And while the focus of the survey was on end users, it’s clear that the broader business opportunities come with tightly linking existing and new communications capabilities into business processes.
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If you are a CIO: • Develop a business-driven vision and strategy that balances the needs of the hyperconnected with the increased effectiveness of the enterprise. It’s no longer just about how work is done, but how business processes are organized and accelerated. Tools and solutions (including unified communications) currently exist that can increase the speed of a decision, use the customer’s time more wisely, and create new kinds of communications-imbedded products.
We have entered a new era of communications, one where the provision of dial tone has given way to communications as a strategic IT discipline. This transformation brings with it tremendous opportunities – but also some risk. Managing this transformation will require multi-discipline development and oversight of the enterprise’s communications strategy, an understanding of the communication applications already in place, and a keen eye to business processes that can be improved if they are faster or more accurate. Classic network design may be in for upheaval as well, as peer-to-peer and real-time communications begin to co-exist with client server applications.
• Partner with HR to develop a strategy for the upcoming war on talent. As baby boomers retire, corporations will find themselves increasingly competing for talent. In a matter of years, up to 40% of the workforce could be “hyperconnected,” with many considering an enriched application and connectivity environment a condition for employment. Together you can turn an upcoming HR challenge into a business opportunity – attracting top talent.
But IDC believes that we are in a unique period in this post dot com era. It is a period of intense innovation, and one where market leaders will be pulling even further ahead of the rest of the market than they are now. Organizations that embrace connectivity, that take their clues from the hyperconnected among us, will be much more successful than those who don’t.
• Drive the organization to modify its personnel policies and business practices to support increased connectivity. The business, not the IT department, must make the rules about personal versus business use and incentives for adoption. The two must work together to manage the changing boundaries in a hyerconnected world. These new policies and practices will need to accommodate a workforce and customer base that spans the spectrum from hyperconnected to barebones user. •
Evolve your security regime. Connectivity tools in the hands of employees may increase productivity, but they also increase the risk of releasing sensitive information to the outside world.
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Acknowledge and manage the technical environment. It may be tempting to resist providing
Work with your communications solution providers as partners. Only with the help of trusted advisors will you be able to determine which solutions will be most appropriate for your particular situation at the moment. Partners will bring you wisdom gleaned from other implementations and also help as a catalyst for organizational change in getting your IT department and business units on the same wavelength.
The trick will be to balance the risks of deploying and supporting these new communications tools with the risks of not supporting them. The former risk may never go away, but the latter will surely get bigger.
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STUDY METHODOLOGY This global survey was fielded during March 2008. In all, IDC surveyed 2,367 men and women across 17 countries in various industries, company size classes, and age segments. To qualify, respondents had to be fully employed, over 17 years old, use a PC at work, and own or use a PDA or mobile phone for either business or personal activities, and have access to the Internet. Respondents represented in the figure below were randomly recruited and screened from international panels in the markets represented. The survey was conducted over the Internet and administered in the local languages. IDC’s experience suggests that attitudinal and behavioral surveys of this type of respondent generally have no inherent bias being fielded over the Internet versus phone. Questions ranged from device and application adoption of technology to location of use, attitudes about connectivity, and assessment of their companies’ effectiveness deploying these new technologies.
The devices and applications covered in the survey included:
Devices
Applications
Desktop computers Laptop computers PDAs (without telephony) Fixed line phones Mobile phones GPS navigation systems MP3 players Video games Monitors/sensors Facsimile devices Cable and satellite TV Network eBook Apple iTV Video transmitter (Slingbox)
Internet browsing eMail Text messaging Instant messaging Web conferencing Internet Video conferencing Voice over IP Social networking (viewing/posting) Blogs, wikis, forums (viewing/posting) Video sharing and uploading Video streaming Multi-player online gaming
Hyperc onnec tivity S ample P rofile
Male 54% F emale 46%
O ther 19%
55+ yrs old 26%
18-34 yrs old 36%
P rofes s ional S ervic e 9% Manufacturing
6%
35-54 yrs old 38%
P ublic S ec tor / E duc ation 19%
F inanc e 10% R etail/T ravel/ T rans port/ Hos pitality , 15%
Healthc are 8%
High T ec h/ T elec om 13%
K ey S urvey S tats F inal S ample > n= 2,367 (+/- 2% Confidence Interval @ 95% Confidence Level) F ieldwork > March 2008 G eographies > Americas: US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Asia Pacific: China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Australia, Japan, Singapore EMEA: UK, Germany, France, Russia, UAE
14 panel sample) S urvey data c ollec tion method > Web (representative R es pondent P rofile/S ampling unit > Individuals that are fully employed, over 17 years old, and use a PC at work, and own or use a PDA or mobile phone for either business or personal activities
Cluster Analysis This White Paper includes the findings from a data analysis technique called cluster analysis, a procedure that determines natural groupings derived from respondents’ adoption and usage of technology. The following specific questions provided the basis for the cluster analysis: 1. Which of the following communication devices do you use for either business or personal activities? Note: For devices with multiple functions, please select all the primary functions you use on that device. 2. Which of the following communication applications do you use for either business or personal activities? Responses were collapsed into two categories, usage and non-usage, for use in the cluster analysis. A total sample of 2,367 respondents was included in the cluster analysis. The final decision on the number of clusters to retain was determined by examining cluster membership for the most homogeneous groupings within each cluster. IDC chose four well-separated clusters with distinct demographics and technology adoption and usage. Based on these profiles, the clusters were labeled as follows: • Hyperconnected • Increasingly Connected
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Passive Online Barebones
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