How consumerization brings real benefits to organizations

Por Marcelo Szuster|
Atualizado: Mai 2020 |
Publicado: Fev 2016

How consumerization brings real benefits to organizations: a practical example on the steel industry

More and more people want to use their mobile devices on working. More than that, people expect to have, on the working environment, digital experiences similar to the ones they have on their daily lives. This phenomenon is named consumerization and is considered an inevitable transformation.

What is the relevance of this phenomenon from a business perspective? Besides representing a change on the behavior of a company’s employees, does this phenomenon bring some benefit to the organizations? How could this trend impact business in a positive way?

At first this does not seem very tangible – what is the differece between some employee using a system that is acessible on a company’s computer, from using this system in its own mobile device via an App? If we stop to think, there is a huge potential to be explored, because using on work an App with an experience that is similar and as good as the experience that we are accostumed to have in our personal apps increases our engagement and reduces learning time.

But the impact is much deeper! The dissemination of technology in pratically all social classes has broken a barrier considered unsormountable during many years: the possibility to easilly provide applications to employees with low level of education. Technology is completelly democratized on the daily lives and the consumerization is nothing more that bringing this democratization for the organizations.

Summarizing: we are entering in a new era where technology dissemination allow organizations to provide powerful and friendly tools to all their employees, independent on their socio-economical background.

If this seems far from our reality, let’s take a real example. A traditional steel plant has the following problem: trucks travel across the scrap yard and eventually suffer some damage. In some cases, the company is responsible for the damage and will have to pay for the repair. In these cases, the scrap yard operators have to register the incident, take a picture of the damage and describe what happened – and they used to do that on a system running on a computer placed on an office that was not very close the yard, as can be seen on the picture bellow:
DTI ENG IMG

Let’s see now the new possibilities brought by consumerization. Wouldn’t it be easier to provide an App to each operator so they could access the system directly on their mobile devices? They could do everything in this app: take the photo, register the incident and describe the damage – without the burden of having to move to the office, upload photos… This was exaclty what was implemented, as described in the picture above. And more than just providing the functionalities, the App was conceived to provide a experience as friendly as possible. This was unthinkable some years ago, both because of the costs of providing high-end modible devices to the operators as well the difficulty to train the operators. With consumerization this is history and the potential must be explored!

A very concept that is behind this case the the concept of Customer Experience. In the digital era, this concept must permeate everything an organization produces – both for its clients and its employees. We will talk a lot about this concept in other posts.

Por: Marcelo Szuster
Revisão: Dandara Chaves

Quer saber mais?

Metodologia Ágil

Confira outros artigos

Veja outros artigos de Metodologia Ágil