eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Consumerization has been a hot topic in the IT world for the last decade, which refers to the trend of consumer technologies making their way into organizations and causing pressure for change in the traditional enterprise IT. It is considered to be one of the most influential IT trends of our time. Gartner's framework of the Nexus of Forces depicts the phenomenon as the core for four dominant technology hypes in the market at the moment; social and mobile technology, cloud and information or big data. All of these are linked to consumerization in one way or the other. The purpose of the study is to find out how the phenomenon effects present day IT-strategies, by using the Nexus of Forces as a framework to discuss the topic on a more concrete level.

The literature review begins from the concepts of strategy and IT strategy and introduces two the- oretical frameworks explaining these concepts. The frameworks are the market driven perspective, also known as the positioning school, and the resource-based view, which explain strategy and IT strategy from differing point of views. The study uses these theories as basis for the analysis on changes in IT strategies. The review also explains the concept of consumerization further and dis- cusses the dimensions of the Nexus of Forces more widely.

The empirical research of this study is conducted through semi-constructed interviews, also known as theme interviews. I interviewed twelve CIO's and CEO's in mid-sized and large companies in Finland to collect recorded data. I analysed the data and arranged the answers into groups according to the topic of the discussion and the types of answers. Finally, I reviewed these categories comparing them to previous research literature.

Based on the research the main influencers on IT strategy are the business strategy, the business environment and the role of IT in the organization. The impact of consumerization and the tech- nology trends on the enterprise IT was visible in the dissatisfaction of employees in the traditional solutions, and the demand for lighter and more flexible systems was evident. Many positive things follow this development, but it also causes big challenges for the IT management in terms of secu- rity and service availability. From the IT strategy perspective the conclusions were mixed due to different interpretations of the concept. However, the dominant view seemed to be that consumer- ization is not directly a strategic matter, unless it was closely related to the company business.