Against a backdrop of ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty and an increase in the likelihood that Western markets are heading towards another period of economic contraction, CIOs are also facing a period of unprecedented volatility in the technology landscape. The rapid pace of change in consumer technology markets, catalyzed by the upswing in the demographic and geographic penetration of smart phones in the past 24 months, is creating a need for the CIO to think not only about how to meet the demands of employees to use their own devices in the workplace and access enterprise applications and data remotely, but also how their business engages with the market at all stages of the customer lifecycle and service delivery.

This is requiring CIOs to look at investment, security and governance strategies that enable them to embrace innovation, plan for volatility and build for ‘the second bounce of the ball’, an approach that has more in common with venture capital than traditional Net Present Value (NPV)-driven techniques for IT investment decision making.

However, while consumerization and mobility presents opportunities for valuable employee-led service and process innovation, defining the right strategy requires a full view of the costs and risks. Provisioning customer and supply-chain facing native mobile applications requires navigation of an immature set of distribution channels. Meeting demand from Millennials entering the workforce or C-Suite executives to use their own devices creates cost and competency challenges for the IT service desk and industry-specific enterprise data governance and security challenges for the enterprise architect. It also requires the CIO to understand the key trigger points that will drive the different development scenarios for the consumerization phenomenon.

This event from Ovum will focus on how CIOs can manage and exploit the consumerization effect and create new engagement models for their businesses with customers, the supply chain and with their employees.

In addition this event will cover:

• Trends and best practice across different industries
• A scenario-based outlook for the future of the consumerization phenomenon, and what this means
  for CIO’s investment strategies
• New analytic tools that the CIO can use to plan and manage distributed innovation within their organisation