Customer Experience – Digital Imperatives? (Part 2)

Posted on July 2, 2015 by smithdavidm

Customer experience is fundamentally about the quality of the interaction between the consumer and the company offering the service. Companies are very keen to ensure that their declared brand values are seen as represented within their delivery experience. A company called Havas Media publishes annually a report called “Meaningful Brands®” which seeks to measure that customer assessment of the overall experience. It is fundamentally a report focused on measuring and understanding the dynamics around brand strength. However, it adds the context of looking at how our quality of life and wellbeing connects with those corporate brands, i.e. the value judgements we make as we experience the service. The research scale is impressive, 1,000 brands, 300,000 people, 34 countries and covering 12 industries. The report states that it “covers all aspects of people’s lives, including the impact on our collective wellbeing (the role brands play in our communities and the communities we care about), in our personal wellbeing (self-esteem, healthy lifestyles, connectivity with friends and family, making our lives easier, fitness and happiness) and marketplace factors, which relate to product performance such as quality and price”.

The Meaningful Brands® 2015 research shows that customer experiences that are felt to contribute significantly to the consumer’s individual quality of life or that of their society are rewarded with stronger business results. In hard commercial terms the research claims that well rated Meaningful Brands outperform the stock market by some 133% and on average gain 46% more “Share of Wallet” than less well perceived players. This analysis appears to support the assertions that many analysts have made that the transparency implicit in the digital age (reviews/referrals being examples) makes the integrity of the brand and the reality of the customer experience critical. Interestingly as a technologist there are 5 technology companies in the top ten global performers and 3 in the top five; Samsung, Google and Sony. Geographic variations are also interesting, only 31% of brands are trusted in Western Europe and only 22% in America. The percentage of brands that are perceived to contribute positively to quality of life are only 7% and 3% respectively. In Latin America that measure is reported at 38% and even higher in developing countries in Asia at 75%. Maria Garrido, Global Head of Data & Consumer Insights at Havas Media is reported as saying: “Brands that enhance the wellbeing of people, communities and societies are more meaningful. In the West, we have a more functional relationship with brands so continuous innovation and product delivery is key. In high growth markets, the relationship between people and brands is one that focuses more on personal benefits. In these regions people look to brands to help them achieve economic status, better experiences and every-day inspiration”. There is a wealth of information and analysis to be found on the Meaningful Brands website and it repays the time spent reviewing.

I would argue that customer experience is not just about the quality of the interaction during the purchase transaction. It is about the values of the brand and how they are felt by the customer as they experience the service and the degree to which they feel connected to that company. The integrity of relationship and the ease with which disappointment can be widely shared are key factors in providing a compelling customer experience. Digital technologies are enabling more direct interactions for companies with their customers. The cost of direct engagement with customers relative to the recent past has dropped and is continuing to do so. Equally at the same time digitalization makes information to assess service quality easily accessible and is enabling ever more transparency. This complex relationship is explored in an excellent article in The Drum by Tash Whitmey entitled “Creating Experiences Customers Actually Value”.

Delivering highly valued customer experiences certainly includes the quality of the product offered and the qualitative nature of consuming it. However, it also seems to be increasingly about how that consumption experience relates to the declared brand values and whether they are consistently lived by the company. Indeed we have seen over the last year or so the impact on corporate reputations which have been tarnished by perceptions over their entirely legal but not admired tax optimisation strategies. At the heart of this dynamics is a complex relationship between consumer and vendor. How that relationship is valued by either party and how the integrity of the interaction is defined has become far more holistic and interesting in the digital age.

This post was previously published on the Business Value Exchange.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.com

Customer Experience – Digital Imperatives? (Part 1)

Posted on June 20, 2015 by smithdavidm

I recently need to make changes to some mobile phone contracts for family members. Our contracts were with two different mobile phone providers and one performed far better than the other. The positive experience was with O2. The website was clear and easy to use, the “instant messaging chat to advisor” service was quick and convenient, the human looking after me was engaging, efficient and extremely helpful. A truly positive customer experience. The other provider who I think should remain nameless provided an experience that had none of those attributes. Customer experience in the digital age is often characterised as our demanding ever more flexibility in how we engage, ever more efficient and enjoyable transactions, ever more rapid delivery and the truism of everything being immediately available at all times. I held my engagement with O2 late on a Sunday night so I think I ticked a few of those characteristics!

The view of the consumer has arguably never been more important or more easily shared. Over recent years the value of a referral or positive review has become increasingly important with access to many different sources at our fingertips.

I realised recently that I now automatically use reviews on sites like Booking.com prior to booking any accommodation, sorting the available options by customer review scores. Many market analysts assert that 75% of all purchase decisions are now preceded by a review, even if the review is online but the purchase is made in-store. Of course in this context the trust in the review source and it offering the collation at sufficient scale for the scores to be meaningful is critical to creating trust in the data integrity.

At the heart of these enhanced customer experiences is the dynamic combination of mobile devices and cloud computing. It is clear that the pace of change is stressing the capability and indeed budget of many IT organisations. Someone recently pointed me at some excellent Forrester material on this challenge. They use the term “Business Technology” and argue that successful CIOs need to lead their organisations from traditional style operating models to managing business technology outcomes and not IT assets. Given a deal of this useful information is behind the Forrester paywall this Computer Weekly article is an excellent articulation of their argument, “Forrester – Manage Business Technology Outcomes Not IT Assets“. At the same time I also recently came across an excellent article entitled 5 Metrics for Digital Success by Aaron Rudger. I particularly liked his suggested five key metrics for the digital age: responsiveness, latency, third party app impact, load testing metrics and finally competitor benchmarking. I will not do justice to the article here but it is well worth a read.

Regardless of what you measure the challenges and the opportunities for IT teams is going to continue to evolve at pace. A common message from analyst articles is that over the next five years the combination of the Internet of Things, pervasive cloud computing and big data will enable organizations to offer services which are able to learn and evolve, are contextually aware and able to react in real time to change. So your strategy needs to ensure that the design is user-centric, that it provides for a high degree of personalisation and contextualisation and that you are able to rapid iterate to innovate.

Customer experience is fundamentally about the quality of the interaction between the consumer and the company offering the service. The intent is to build a relationship of trust and value with the consumer so they are both a repeat buyer but more important an advocate for you. There is as deal of research you can find that explores what transforms a buyer into a brand advocate. The quality of the product or service is clearly key but is it sufficient? Are there other factors being assessed by your customers when they decide whether to post that glowing review on your service? I would argue that there are a range of criteria explicitly and implicitly being assessed every time someone experiences your service. It would seem to me that the value judgements being made are becoming more sophisticated and perhaps based on some interesting research I recently read far more holistic that we might expect?

This post was previously published on the Business Value Exchange.
Image via Shutterstock.com.

D For Device? Or Data? Or Both?

Posted on May 29, 2015 by smithdavidm

I think most people would agree that the blurring of the boundary between our working and personal lives is accelerating. I know from many discussions that some people are more comfortable with that trend than others. Typically those yet to see their 35th birthday seem to be mostly supportive, those that have gone past that milestone tend to be at best more sceptical at the value proposition. There are countless case studies on highly successful companies that demonstrate their success is linked in some way to their employees having a personal commitment and deep affinity to the corporate objectives. However, recently I have read a few reports which argued that part of building that alignment can be enabled by removing the distinction between corporate devices and personal devices. They argue that in some way this step impacts on the psyche of the employees making work more personal and so building a stronger sense of ownership. Typically the term used in this context is Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) although there is a variant which has proponents where the employee is enabled to select device of choice from a defined catalogue, namely Choose Your Own Device (CYOD). The latter is intended to mitigate perceived risks associated with the operating model of BYOD and its implicit wide range of device options.

I must confess to have some doubts on the impact ascribed to BYOD in the context of employee empowerment. I certainly accept that it can reduce operating expenses and decrease the level of corporate investment in enabling technology. I have been involved in defining and deploying a BYOD strategy twice thus far in my career. I can point to the financial benefits arising from trading convenient access to selected corporate data stores from employee’s smartphone for the cost of providing a corporate variant. However, the more I talked to CIOs who have deployed BYOD schemes and some of their highly enthused employees I have heard the empowerment message coming through loud and clear. A very confident “millennial” enthusiast for BYOD pointed out to me that she saw her smartphone and tablet as being in many ways an extension of her personality. The growth of highly personalised wearable devices which often have a key link to the smartphone of choice is only going to make this blurred boundary more challenging. It seems likely that intelligent watch is going to become mainstream particularly now with the arrival of the Apple Watch. People are not likely to distinguish between their personal and corporate watch. They will want the benefits from their device of choice in the workplace both in personal and corporate terms.

However, accepting that engagement can be driven upward by a BYOD scheme it is very clear that the most important “D” in that context is not the “device” but rather the “data”.
Information assurance and how the corporate data set is protected is undoubtedly the key to unlock BYOD deployment and the promise of more engaged, committed and enabled employees. If you cannot securely manage access to the corporate data employees need or want or both to access from their own device then the scope of the BYOD deployment is going to be constrained and most likely disappoint the user community. We can all identify sectors where this constraint is in place. Indeed it is clearly shown when you look at BYOD adoption by industry sector analysis that there are sectors where there are specific restrictions driven by information assurance policies.

I recently read (in a Forrester report I think) that by 2017 over 50% of private sector organizations will no longer provide devices to their employees. This same report highlighted that the majority of IT decision makers believe they would be at a competitive disadvantage if they do not embrace BYOD. A quick look via the internet search engine of your choice will provide a great deal of material on how to define and deploy a BYOD policy.

There are some great case studies available from the early adopters with interesting insights including one that stuck in my memory of a company whose network performance was crippled as the BYOD was so successful and their policy did not limit the number of devices each employee could bring to the party. The vast majority of what I have read focuses on the criticality of managing access to the corporate data and so the associated risk. So you have the classic compromise situation whereby the drive from employees for an expansive BYOD deployment needs to be balanced with a securely managed data access model. If these two aspects can be balanced then there is undoubtedly huge value in what can be derived from embracing BYOD. Indeed many would argue that approaching corporate IT from the “IT consumerisation” user perspective can lead to valuable innovation of the corporate data security model. A good case for this line of argument is made by Stacey Leidwinger in her blog post entitled “Embracing Employee Empowerment“.

At the heart of this debate are what might be termed two absolute truths. Employees that are frustrated and thwarted by restrictive technology will generally find a way around those obstacles or at the very least introduce risk by trying to do so. At the same time in the digital age it is clear that security of corporate data must not constrain user enablement. I think it is well recognised today that King Canute like IT departments that attempt to resist the oncoming tide of end user expectations are going to find themselves drowning under a wave of “Shadow IT” challenges. They may well find that crucially in so doing they have driven a range of key business risks subterranean too.

Part of this post has previously been published on the Business Value Exchange.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Getting personal with the cloud

Posted on April 3, 2012 by smithdavidm

If there’s one thing the IT industry is spectacularly good at, it is producing buzzwords. Marketing executives – even management gurus – look enviously over their shoulders at our industry’s propensity to churn out a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new acronyms and expressions. We over use them in PowerPoint, extolling the virtues of the latest X and how it will mean Y to Z and to all of Z’s customers. Meanwhile our audiences wearily roll their eyes upwards at each new piece of jargon!

So, after an endless diatribe of Private Clouds, Public Clouds and Hybrid Clouds, does anybody have the energy for Personal Clouds? And when we learn it is rooted in consumer IT – itself the most crowded territory for industry jargon (think ‘Mobile’, ‘Post PC’, ‘BYOD’, ‘User Experience’ – it never stops) – we’re reaching for the off switch. Why should we care? Perhaps more to the point, why should I risk antagonising you by writing a blog on the subject?

I could start by explaining the idea of the Personal Cloud is gaining traction across the IT industry. Gartner, for example, were predicting last month that Personal Cloud would replace the PC by 2014. Or that a cursory search of Google Trends shows the term first appearing in web searches as recently as June 2011, and growing rapidly ever since. But hype of course is no justification of something’s worth in itself. Worse, it’s so often accompanied by the array of contradictory definitions that seem to meet every new piece of IT terminology. The important thing is to look at what is actually happening out there. Because whatever words we want to use, whatever charts we want to draw, an important development is taking place.

For me there are two parts to this.

One is that we now have an unprecedented range of consumer utilities at our disposal to enable our – for want of a better phrase – personal productivity. All the things that you need to do in your daily life – communicate, write, find things out, calculate, plan and schedule, collaborate and share – are enabled by software. And these days you are quite likely to go online for your software because, let’s face it, apps are as cheap as chips and very often they are free. When consumed in this way, the set of utilities starts to resemble a virtual space which exists somewhere ‘out there’. This is where the term Personal Cloud may start to seem relevant. Moreover, this is perhaps the first truly consumerized set of software with real consumer product DNA. It is pure B2C, whereas MS Office and its ilk have their heritage in B2B – even when they have been sold to the C.

Second is to consider this in the context of mobile devices. It is fair to say that if you use a PC you are probably happy to use a workspace that is fixed and licensed to that machine. Traditionally, that has been provided for you by your company. More than likely you have created a similar environment on a home PC – maybe the software was cheaper than the corporate version but nonetheless what you bought came in a cardboard box wrapped in cellophane. Its code is now firmly attached to the hard disk – as is the information you have created from it. Mobile changes everything. You probably don’t need me to argue that with a mobile device, online, consumer software makes the most sense. But here’s the thing. The real value of Personal Cloud is not about your first mobile device, it’s about your second, and your third. As you add more devices – a smartphone here, a media tablet there, so it becomes more beneficial to you that your software and personal information are virtualised and accessible. DropBox and Apple’s iCloud are enjoying huge popularity as people realise how much easier it is to have a consistent experience across their devices. Of course you also have come to realise you need – and expect – the same experience across all of your computers – home and work.

Lurking behind all this, like a troublesome and unwelcome party guest, is a profound implication for the way that businesses deliver end user computing to their employees. Because now you’ve got your personal devices synced, isn’t it time you also synced your work stuff? And if you already have a virtual workspace, which by the way you can access at work, why would you need your employer to provide you with an alternative, possibly inferior one? And would you use it?

There is already strong impetus in the enterprise for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and no doubt you will be familiar with the arguments. The use of mobile in the workplace is a disruptive force and is being viewed by the enterprise, albeit with suspicion, as mostly harmless. But the argument for Personal Cloud is slightly different. Devices are as varied as they are disposable. Their useful life expectancy is falling. No one device will define what’s personal to us. It will be our own personal experience – the set of information and applications that we use – that will become the footprint that defines us and persists with us. This is what Personal Cloud has the potential to deliver.

Personal Cloud is therefore likely to overtake mobile as the number one headache for CIOs. Consumer technology has a Trojan Horse feel about it. It sits outside the enterprise walls, gathering a lot of attention, as suspicious IT functions ready themselves to accept the seemingly harmless gift. But as we all know, it wasn’t a big hollow wooden horse that did for the Trojans. It was its payload of Greek warriors, led by Odysseus, who crept out in the dead of night and opened up all the city gates to break a ten year deadlock. Likewise, Personal Cloud will be carried into the enterprise on mobile devices. It will change the way enterprises deliver end-user computing for good.

Interactions between the physical and digital worlds

Posted on February 9, 2012 by smithdavidm

Working for an Information Technology company presents me with a view of life that the digital economy is a must and an integral part of today’s society yet, where that may be true in some parts of the world and within certain demographics, it’s not a statement that everyone would recognise.

But technology is increasing its impact our world every day and lots of very inventive people are finding ways that the digital world can support the physical world, even in very poor and under-developed regions.

The trend for me in this blog post is not the consumerisation of IT as an IT professional may see it, but at what point is something compelling for a consumer, who has very little in the physical world compelled to join the digital world because it makes a significant difference to their daily life?

An excellent example is the Reuters Mobile Light service provided to Indian farmers since 2007 to provide commodity prices, crop and weather data via SMS. Often a community shares a handset but individuals have their own SIM. The service has grown as one subscriber often shares the information with their community to decide where is the best place to send their produce to get the best price and now even use mobile phones to control irrigation.

In more developed parts of the world what we want can be very different, but still critical to our day to day needs with the ability to respond to a need being very fast indeed, such as using a cell phone to measure exposure to radiation in response to specific events such as last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Mobile technology is not just useful to respond to disasters, for example going for a health check at a labyrinth of a hospital and wondering how long one is going to have to wait, lead to the creation of a patient guidance system that should take some of the stress out of the visit – and there are many other examples of mobile applications allowing us to take care of ourselves and improve our physical well-being.

This tells us that the digital world can be a significant force for good in the physical world, the needs of the developing world are very different from the developed world and, using ITU numbers, it seems that a third of the developed world is still not connected (two thirds in the developing world).

So, we can all “do our bit” by taking the 2G mobile handsets that we last used about five years ago and are collecting dust in a drawer, digging them out and sending them to our favourite charities, who may use them to help people in other parts of the world (for example, the Indian farmers) and allow greater participation in the digital society.

Futurology: art, science or nonsense?

Posted on December 19, 2011 by smithdavidm

Recently I was asked to present to a group of MBA students on my view of the future and how technology will shape our world by 2015 through to 2020 and beyond. I decided to deliver the session under the title “Futurology – Science, Art or Nonsense?”.

Futurology: art, science, nonsense?

At this time of year it is tempting to wrap up the events of the year with a forecast of what the future will bring. You may be pleased to know that I am going to resist that temptation!

This is primarily because, early in 2012, we will be refreshing the Fujitsu view of the trends shaping our world and the potential outcomes, Technology Perspectives, so I’ll hold fire for now – although I do commend the current material to you as we will evolve our views not completely re-invent them!

Even so, I couldn’t resist re-reading my blog post from December 2010 and musing on how much of what I talked about was still relevant. The post was primarily about the concept of consumerisation of IT and my sense then that it was not restricted to being the generational trait that in 2010 many of us had linked to “Generation Y”. Twelve months on, I think it is clear that the expectation our corporate workplace will have the same 21st century technology capabilities as the consumer arena has moved into the mainstream. The most frequent topic on which I’ve been asked to give an opinion in 2011 is “Bring Your Own” technology (BYO) in its many variants and consequences for the corporate IT landscape. Indeed at the point where I moved from the CIO position in Fujitsu UK and Ireland to my current role the two topics dominating my CIO barometer of demand were requests for BYO solutions and our moving to support Android based smartphones and tablets within our own BYO initiative.

If you remember with the help of my HR colleagues I was able to have the data set rendered anonymous and then age group analysed. In May when the demand on these topics started to register in the monthly statistics there was a clear Generation Y skew, however by September the total figures for Android support were equally split between Generation Y and Generation X (c45% each of volume) yet the BYO demand remained Generation Y dominated (60% of volume). I’m not going to ponder on the demographic angle in this post but what I will say is that in a company of around 12,000 employees over the period I had over 1,000 requests for BYOT and over 2,500 requests for Android smartphone or tablet support (not necessarily all unique, i.e. people could have requested both). This level of interest mirrored what we saw in the marketplace and in the requests for opinion from CIOs from across our client base.

So whilst I am sidestepping listed some forecasts for 2012 I can say that the most common topic I have been asked to talk about over recently months is “Big Data” and “Smart Cities/Infrastructure” (the Intelligent Society). I no longer have the CIO Barometer to give me some data points but I am willing to assert that I think in 12 months we may well be reflecting on a year that saw that concept become pervasive and examples of business value being derived from it become easy to list.

It seems appropriate to end my last blog post of 2011 in the year which saw the passing of Steve Jobs to end with one of my favourite Apple related quotes. The final line from Apple’s famous Think Different campaign was:

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

Clearly 2012 is going to be a challenging year on so many levels for us all, but alongside the challenges there are plenty of opportunities too. Have a restful festive period and return refreshed for what lies ahead.

Stereotypes – Shaken and Stirred?

Posted on February 11, 2011 by smithdavidm

Last week I was invited to talk at a D Group event on the topic of Generation Y. The discussion after my monologue was wide ranging and extremely interesting, particularly as it had a business leader perspective rather than a technology orientation. One element of my material that generated a deal of debate was a demographic analysis that I had prepared on ten months worth of my “why can’t I?” email collection. I’ve mentioned this weekly collation of incoming requests and challenges from my user base and how I use it as an insightful barometer of technology demand in an earlier post. Spookily, the demand alignment to demographic stereotypes is pretty much what you might expect, for example demand for Android based tablets receiving corporate email and other services coming from Generation Y, but the same services for Apple iPhones/iPads coming from Generation X. An interesting data point for me was that the demand for Microsoft Windows based tablets to be enabled for corporate services was almost entirely from Baby-Boomers which has some interesting implications perhaps for the Nokia/Microsoft link up announced today. The only other requests overwhelmingly dominated by one demographic related to self selection of of smartphone or computer for use in corporate context; 80% of those requests were from Generation Y. This is interesting as, just as in many other companies, Generation Y is a minority group within our population but that will change over the coming decade and it signals an emerging demand loud and clear (I’ll discuss the way I meet the demand on social media and also on personal smartphone use in a future post).

The term emerging also figured prominently as I prepared some material to present at the quarterly Fujitsu Executive Discussion Evening event that we provide for our customers. The topic of the evening was innovation at the sharp end and some event materials may be found on the i-CIO website, including videos taken of speakers and attendees on the night.

I opened my presentation using an infographic which shows the most efficient nations at turning R&D spend into patents submitted in 2008 together with the raw numbers submitted on a world map. As you view the map from west to east the efficiency dramatically rises until you find that South Korea is massively more efficient than any other country and in the same total number band as the USA and Japan. The United States does relatively poorly on the efficiency measure, certainly not what you might expect for the world’s largest economy; the UK has the same efficiency rating. Now I would love to see the data repeated for 2009 and 2010 but I think we can probably safely assume that that rise of the countries like China, India and South Korea will not have slowed.

Perhaps what is interesting is to link the demographic perspective from my data set to the population trends in the emerging economic super-powers, and to the efficiency indicated by the infographic, to form a view on the location and drivers for future innovation. Clearly filing patents is not the same as being certain that the invention will lead to a business innovation, i.e. a change in how we do something in either consumer or corporate space that generates business benefit and ultimately money. However, it does give pause for though. At the Intellect Annual Regent Conference last week Mike Lynch (the founder and CEO of Autonomy) gave an excellent interview (as reported by Nick Heath on Silicon.com) in which he said that the majority of start-ups in Silicon Valley today were being established by South Koreans and that, in his view, we need to attract the “uber-talented” to set up their companies in Britain to create jobs and innovation profit engines in our economy. At the time I was surprised by the reference to South Korea – a day later I saw the infographic discussed above and a penny dropped for me!

An Innovation Perspective

View more presentations from Fujitsu UK

It seems that the last a week or so proved some stereotypes to be correct for me but also shook up some of my preconceptions and thinking. All in all, that must have been a jolly good week!

[Updated 31 August 2011 to include David’s presentation slides]

The consumerisation of enterprise IT: resistance is futile

Posted on November 12, 2010 by smithdavidm

I spent a fascinating afternoon with Apple today in the briefing centre above their flagship Regent Street store. What was even more impressive to my wife (and to me!) was that I managed to resist the urge to go and buy myself, for personal use, the lovely new Macbook Air laptop. The agenda covered a number of interesting topics including the use of Apple iPad as a corporate device and, specifically, a topic critical to me – the impending Apple iOS 4.2 release.

There are many indicators that CIOs use to judge the emergent trends and the high demand requirements within their remits. One measure I use is my weekly barometer of the “why oh why cannot I not….” volume of email refrains I receive. Currently there are two requests dominating this demand flow, the first is “why will you not allow my Android smartphone to connect to corporate systems?” and the close second is “why will you not allow my Apple iPad to connect to the corporate systems for which you support Apple iPhone based access?”. In this post I’d like to stick with the Apple theme but I will return to the Android request volume at a later point as it is twice the scale of the iPad request volume and is more than matching the levels I saw earlier in the year in relation to our delivering corporate services to Apple iPhone.

Internally we operate a Fujitsu mobility service called Mobile Professional through which I allow company and personally owned smartphones to receive corporate services such as messaging. The personally owned devices have to meet prerequisites such as operating system/version, operating our corporate airtime provider SIM, individuals signing up to monitoring and remote wiping etc.; however, to date I have refused to certify the iPad OS as it currently fails to meet our minimum requirements but that will hopefully soon change with the release of iOS4.2. What was really interesting was the conversation I had with the Apple representatives in that meeting around the market trend of IT consumerisation and the opportunity that represents for Apple to grow its share of the corporate market.

Indeed the phrase “corporate market” is an interesting term as the trend for companies to provide cash allowances and give some freedom to their employees to select/operate their computing device of choice. Clearly as a CIO within a technology company which manufactures laptops I’m not likely to adopt this approach anytime soon! However, I effectively have implemented a variant of that approach in relation to smartphones, partly recognising that mobile phones are a very personal choice it is hard to consistently meet and partly recognising the value that can be derived from employees purchasing their own if so motivated and thereby removing the device cost from the P&L. The drive of the employee to demand 21st century capabilities at work to match what they have at home rather than being stuck in the late 20th century has been commented upon many times, sometimes under the Generation Y banner and sometimes under IT consumerisation.

What is clear to me and I’m sure to many of you is that, regardless of the driver, the demand is here today, continues to grow in strength and must be harnessed to generate business value, sidestepping the ultimately fruitless war of resistance. If you accept that point to any level then those technology providers who are dominant in the consumer space are going to become part of your portfolio under corporate management sooner or later. At that point, the key is whether you can manage that evolutionary process to an acceptable level of risk or whether it overwhelms your standards and your ability to contain both the risk and indeed the potential incremental cost implications.

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