With a little push from the former Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, government agencies are taking cues from private sector. In a new blog series, Unisys will explore the future of consumerization in government, the challenges this developing trend presents for federal IT managers and best practices for implementing a secure, manageable mobile IT strategy. (Reference Venkatapathi Puvvada’s post on Consumerization and Government – What Does It All Mean?) Feel free to join the discussion and post your thoughts on what agencies and contractors should take into consideration when adopting consumer tech in the workplace.

Like many free-floating fears, IT managers’ security worries aren’t just paranoid fantasies — they do have some basis in reality. For example, 70 percent of IT respondents to our survey cited employee-provided smartphones as security threats. The research shows that consumer and social technologies are entering the workplace about 50 percent more quickly than IT realizes, so in a sense, the situation that IT managers see as a threat is intensifying.

So what actions are IT executives taking to accommodate this fearsome reality? The short answer is “not enough.”

On the positive side, about 90 percent of IT respondents said that their organizations perform automatic anti-virus updates on employees’ mobile devices and about 60 percent conduct automatic backup for them. Both of these categories are up from last year’s survey.

Yet those organizations have backslid more than they’ve progressed since last year, doing worse in a number of critical areas: requiring employee training, mandating complex passwords, and providing secure access to corporate applications from smartphones.

This lack of broad-spectrum action is as incongruous as it is alarming. IT management does itself no favors if it coasts along in a state of security inertia in the face of legitimate fears that can have significant consequences for the entire enterprise.

The reason for the lack of concerted action may be simple: IT executives feel overwhelmed. For example, 80 percent of our IT respondents say that, generally, consumerization of IT is increasing the departmental workload. When you feel you have to deal with all the contributing factors at once, security can become just one overwhelming and inadequately addressed priority among myriad.

Whatever the specific reasons for this paralysis, the call to action is clear. As Cher memorably said in “Moonstruck,” “Snap out of it!” IT managers need to make security a priority and revisit and revamp their security policies right away. Doing so is a crucial step toward leveraging consumerization of IT, spurring workers’ productivity, and furthering the business interests of the enterprise while protecting vital corporate assets.

As always, we welcome your thoughts on this topic in the comments section below.

I would like to highlight GSA’s leadership and team approach that created a collegial work environment that helped make the transition successful. The critical success factor for the project was the creation of the integrated project teams (IPTs), each headed by a GSA leader with the support of the Unisys team — including Google and Tempus Nova.

GSA staff and contractors with other roles in support of GSA were also included in the IPTs for transition, communications, training, policy, and accessibility. All of us worked closely as a team on a first name basis; no competing contractor/company names or government positions were designated to distract us from the project at hand.

This helped us to tackle some technical challenges. For example, GSA has Blackberry accounts held by users throughout the country that had to be refreshed to work with Google Apps, and there were a few hundred other e-mail accounts that presented challenges for migration. And as would be expected for a transition of this size, there were lots of help desk calls to answer.

But the biggest challenge was probably around communications, including training. We spent a lot of time up-front preparing GSA employees for the changes to come. To promote self-help support, we worked to set up a “user experience site” early on that was updated at least once daily based on the types of problems new users were having.

Because we had gone through two earlier migrations with smaller user populations (i.e. IT pilot and early adopter phases), we had already uncovered most of the big “gotchas.” But on our “go-live” date of June 20, there were still a lot of unknowns — given GSA’s dispersed user base around the U.S. and overseas. The entire team worked closely and around the clock for about five days after the go-live date to make sure everything was working correctly.

Initial response from users has been very positive, regarding both the ease of the transition as well as the functionality in the new tools.

A variety of factors might contribute to that particular crevice in the “Consumerization Gap,” but here’s one we think is a prime reason: outmoded governance policies, particularly in equipment purchasing.

The vast majority of the IT decision makers we surveyed in our 2011 study — 87 percent, in fact — say that they follow the “tried and true” model of purchasing a standard set of mobile devices for employees and paying usage charges.

However, more than half of iWorkers say they have purchased their own consumer devices without any employer reimbursement and are using them for work.

Clearly, IT is earnestly trying to enforce policies that workers are ignoring in droves so they can obtain the tools they believe enable them to be most productive. Management is falling short in recognizing the extent of real consumerization and creating policies to help the business capitalize on the trend’s potential.

This myopia seems to extend to collateral policy areas as well — especially security. Eighty-three percent of IT respondents see security concerns as the greatest barrier to enabling employees to use their own devices for work.

Yet this year’s research shows that those decision makers haven’t established cohesive security policies for use of consumer technology. In fact, they’ve regressed since last year in many key areas.

That lack of coherent security policies might be partly due to IT’s underestimating the extent to which employees are already flooding the workplace with self-purchased devices. You can’t secure and manage what you don’t know about.

We’ll discuss what IT is — and isn’t — doing to address security concerns and challenges in an upcoming post. But one thing is clear: The perceived threat is likely snowballing as more unaccounted-for devices enter the workplace while IT focuses on executing outmoded policies designed to subsidize and control consumer technology. Ultimately, that’s not a winning or even a cost-efficient strategy.

As always, we welcome your thoughts on this topic in the comments section below.

What are key influencers saying? Here’s a sampling:

• Nancy Gohring of IDG was most interested in the misconceptions enterprises had about the state of their infrastructure: “Enterprises think they are in control of these devices, but in fact they are in control of only a small part of their infrastructure, with a significant number of employees going off the grid in acquiring and using their own devices.” You can read her full piece here.

• ReadWriteWeb’s Klint Finley was drawn to the “always on” nature of today’s workforce and the interesting places that respondents admitted to work-related mobile usage.

• Lynnette Luna wondered if the consumerization trend would wind up costing organizations more in the long run, despite the savings upfront from not having to purchase mobile devices for their workforce.

Others opted to present the data as a slide show, like this piece from Michael Vizard at IT Business Edge. Or this one from Dennis McCafferty for CIO Insight.

We’re thrilled by all the conversation our study has generated, but we’re even more interested in what these findings mean to you. How does your organization match up against those in the results? What statistics jumped out at you?

Tweet us or submit a comment below to let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our transition proposal defined an aggressive six-month migration plan with three phases — IT pilot (involving 100 members of GSA’s technical staff), early adopters (a selection of 500 users from throughout GSA), and remaining associates (the rest of GSA’s employees). By June 20, almost all of the more than 10 terabytes of server-side data had already been moved to Google Apps, leaving just a small delta. With Unisys engineering advice, GSA had installed a new two-factor authentication engine to make remote access easier and more secure.

Our subcontractor completed the training, and GSA launched its more broad-based “Drive to the Cloud” strategy — e-mail being the first step. GSA also launched the Google Chrome Web browser to all agency PCs to ensure an optimal experience for the new environment. Late on a warm Friday night in Washington, DC, we were ready to go!

The best thing about the project was the team effort involving GSA and the Unisys team. For many of us, it was one of the most fun projects we had ever been involved with. And the opportunity for efficiency is now in front of us. The real story, yet to be written, is about collaboration. And while e-mail might still be the key component of our digital fabric, the opportunity to work smarter is evolving quickly.

There were some challenges encountered on the way for sure. I will discuss how we overcame those in subsequent blog posts. For now, I’d like to thank GSA, Google, our subcontractor, and everyone on our Unisys team for working together so well.

So for the new round of research we’ve conducted with IDC on the consumerization of IT, we decided to simplify things a bit by creating an infographic on the findings.

The infographic illustrates the “Great IT Freezeout” that is taking place within organizations today. While iWorkers are increasingly purchasing and using mobile devices and social apps on their own — even employing those tools to connect with customers, suppliers, and colleagues — IT departments appear to be frozen in an arctic tundra of the past, unaware of usage patterns within their organization and stubbornly clinging to old models that no longer work in the new world of social collaboration.

The final panel of the infographic illustrates one of the most interesting findings. When we asked CIOs and other IT decision makers where they view themselves on the innovation scale, 70 percent rated themselves as late or last adopters of new technology.

For decades, IT departments have claimed they want to be viewed as a business partner, helping to advance strategic goals, rather than simply as an enforcer of policies and purchasing decisions. And yet today, as emerging mobile and social tools are unleashing a flood of innovation — new companies, new business models, new ways of getting work done — IT is seriously behind the curve and, in our view, risks making itself irrelevant by not getting with the consumerization trend.

Widely read IT outlet GigaOM also featured our infographic today. In her analysis of the data, writer Stacey Higginbotham states, “Enterprise employees have shifted from the gray and controlled world of corporate IT to the colorful Oz of consumer technologies, but according to data from an IDC/Unisys survey IT is in need of some kind of wizard to sort things out.”

Why is this happening? Is IT paralyzed by the enormity of the trend? Is IT risking irrelevance? As always, we welcome your thoughts.

Here’s what we found most surprising — even alarming: While last year’s Unisys-IDC study found a wide gap between the penetration of consumer technologies in the workplace and IT’s support for them, IT leaders have done astonishingly little in the interim to close that gap. In fact, our 2011 survey found that the divide between IT workers’ use of consumer technology and IT decision makers’ readiness to support and capitalize on consumerization is growing.

We call this the “Consumerization Gap.” The IT decision makers we surveyed certainly aren’t blind to the trend. They agree that consumerization is a growing and potentially beneficial movement, and they see the need to support it (see figure 2).

But when it comes to planning and delivering that support, IT continues to lag in a number of crucial areas. For example, the IT respondents rate themselves lower now than in 2010 for the support they provide for consumer technologies.

There are a variety of factors contributing to IT’s decreased performance rating, which we’ll cover in future posts. But one of the most startling is simple lack of awareness. IT decision makers underestimate, by 50 percent or more, the extent to which consumer and social technologies have penetrated their organizations (see figure 3).

Given this dangerously skewed perception of their internal technology landscape, is it any wonder that IT organizations are, overall, slowly becoming overwhelmed by consumerization? Worse, they are missing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to exploit a trend that can make their workers more productive, their organizations more cost-efficient, and their business more competitive.

We’ll be diving into more of the factors fueling the widening of the Consumerization Gap in our next post. Until then, tell us what you think. Is there a Consumerization Gap in your organization? How bad is it? Alternatively, is your company making good use of consumer tech? How so?