This great infographic was done by Unisys to demonstrate the current landscape of consumerization of IT, and how Enterprise IT departments plan to keep up. Out of the survey it is found that most IT department are completely out of touch with how “iWorkers” prefer to work, and is completely unprepared for it. What is pretty interesting is that most respondents claimed to buy their choice of device themselves – this is in stark contrast to the IT department of yesteryear where users had a limited catalogue of hardware, and those hardware devices were the only supported way to access your work resources.

Modern workers prefer using their own devices, and expect IT to support this. In a way IT departments have to shift to a device independent services offering – which might not sound too difficult in smaller businesses, but in large business it is a monumental task. So I have a few issues with this infographic:

• When they refer to “modernized” customer facing applications – are they referring to actual applications running on the phone? This is strange, because smarter organizations these days tend to focus on device independent web interfaces. Using modern HTML5 methods, these web sites can be very high quality.
• “IT is doing less to secure mobile devices” – There is one major reason for this. Modern mobile device management software has a major flaw – they can do not support all modern mobile devices on the same level. On certain platforms this is an overly manual process of sending config files to devices. Blackberry has brilliant enterprise management. iOS – not so much. Once all the new smartphone platforms start seeing enterprise management as a priority (which happens little by little with each release), this will improve. My issue here is probably rather with Apple – Android has been playing along more with MDM solutions like Afaria. Apple compatible MDM tends to rely on silly apps in order to communicate with MDM servers. Microsoft is however also looking to support more mobile platforms in future versions of SCCM. But we have to wait for Tech Ed to see how that pans out.

At the end of the day it is important to remember that infograhics these days are primarily used to market a service – so some statements have to be taken in context for whom the infographic is made. Otherwise this infographic is pretty spot on – and a harsh wake up call to IT departments… (It is pretty big, so you have to see it after the break)