As many IT workers develop greater technology skills and apply them to advance their careers, many digital workers in non-IT departments believe their CIO is out of touch with their technology needs. A Gartner, Inc. survey found that less than 50 percent of workers (both IT and non-IT) believe their CIOs are aware of digital technology problems that affect them.
The survey further revealed that European workers said that their CIO is more aware of technical challenges (58 percent) than US workers believe they are (41 percent).
"Non-IT workers aren't likely to use the IT help desk as their first source of assistance, and are less likely to believe in the value of their IT organization," said Whit Andrews, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. "Only one in five non-IT workers would ask their IT department to supply best practices for employing technology."
The survey also revealed that millennials were less likely to approach IT support teams through conventional means. About 53 percent of surveyed millennials outside the IT department said that one of their first three ways to solve a problem with digital technology would be to look for an answer on the internet.
Non-IT workers were overall more likely than IT workers to express dissatisfaction with the technologies supplied for their work. IT workers express greater satisfaction with their work devices than do workers outside IT departments. Only 41 percent of non-IT workers felt very or completely satisfied with their work devices, compared to 59 percent of surveyed IT workers.
"Many IT departments will be more successful if they are able to provide what workers say they need, and provide inspiration so they can increase the workforce's digital dexterity," Andrews added.
IT Workers Feel More Confident
IT workers feel more confident than non-IT workers at using digital technology. The survey found that 32 percent of IT workers characterized themselves as experts in the digital technologies they use in the workplace. Just 7 percent of non-IT workers felt the same.
"While we expect IT people to feel more confident with digital technologies, these findings highlight how hard it is to help non-IT workers feel as digitally dexterous as IT workers do," said Andrews.
67 percent of non-IT workers feel that their organization does not take advantage of their digital skills.
"Organizations seeking to mature and expand their digital workplaces will find that expanding digital dexterity will accelerate this across the organization," added Andrews.
Digital Technology Satisfies 72 Percent of Digital Workers
About three in four digital workers either somewhat agree (48 percent) or strongly agree (24 percent) that the digital technology their organization provides enables them to accomplish their work.
The most common types of workplace applications used by survey respondents were real-time messaging (58 percent), sharing tools (55 percent), and workplace social media (52 percent — see Figure 1).
However, significant distinctions exist in the workplace.
"Millennial digital workers are more inclined than older age groups are to use workplace applications and devices that are not provided by their organization, whether they are tolerated or not," said Andrews. "They also have stronger opinions about the collaboration tools they select for themselves. They are more likely to indicate they should be allowed to use whatever social media they prefer for work purposes."
In addition, relative to the total workforce, a larger proportion of millennials consider the applications they use in their personal lives to be more useful than those they are given at work.
"Our survey found that 26 per cent of workers between the ages of 18 and 24 use unapproved applications to collaborate with other workers, compared with just 10 per cent of those aged between 55 and 74," Andrews said.
About the Survey: The survey was conducted online, from February through March 2017, among 3,120 respondents in the US, Europe and Asia/Pacific. The survey's objective was to understand digital workers' attitudes toward technology, their engagement with their work and their satisfactions with the applications provided by their organization.
The Latest
Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...
Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...
Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...
Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...
This holiday shopping season, the stakes for online retailers couldn't be higher ... Even an hour or two of downtime for a digital storefront during this critical period can cost millions in lost revenue and has the potential to damage brand credibility. Savvy retailers are increasingly investing in observability to help ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. Just ahead of the holiday season, New Relic released its State of Observability for Retail report, which offers insight and analysis on the adoption and business value of observability for the global retail/consumer industry ...
As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution ... While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model ...
In the same way a city is a sum of its districts and neighborhoods, complex IT systems are made of many components that continually interact. Observability requires a comprehensive and connected view of all aspects of the system, including even some that don't directly relate to its technological innards ...
Multicasting in this context refers to the process of directing data streams to two or more destinations. This might look like sending the same telemetry data to both an on-premises storage system and a cloud-based observability platform concurrently. The two principal benefits of this strategy are cost savings and service redundancy ...
In today's rapidly evolving business environment, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) are grappling with the challenge of regaining control over their IT roadmap. The constant evolution and introduction of new technology releases, combined with the pressure to deliver innovation on shrinking budgets, has added layers of complexity for executives who must transform the perception of the role of the IT leader from cost managers and maintainers to strategic enablers of growth and profitability ...
Artificial intelligence (AI) has saturated the conversation around technology as compelling new tools like ChatGPT produce headlines every day. Enterprise leaders have correctly identified the potential of AI — and its many tributary technologies — to generate new efficiencies at scale, particularly in the cloud era. But as we now know, these technologies are rarely plug-and-play, for reasons both technical and human ...
