Dubbed “Digital Natives,” U.S. adults coming of age around the turn of century – aka Millennials – are driving fundamental change in information and communications technology (ICT) throughout organizations. Millennials, according to a new study from TrackVia, “have embraced the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) and Bring-Your-Own-Application (BYOA) revolution like no other generation in the workplace.”
TrackVia, a provider of do-it-yourself application platforms for businesses, found that nearly 70 percent of all Millennials said they bring applications from outside the company to support their work, despite this often running counter to corporate policies. Just 31 percent of Baby Boomers admitted to doing the same.
Millennials and BYOD
Accustomed to finding and making use of new devices, applications and ICT services on their own, Millennials are making regular use of cloud tools and services, such as Box, Google Drive and Evernote, to help them do their jobs. Nearly half use their own apps, “because corporate apps don’t meet their needs,” according to a TrackVia press release.
Such habits pose challenges for IT departments. Sixty-nine percent of Millennials said they never work with IT when choosing new business apps. Sixty percent said they aren’t concerned about corporate security when making use of personal apps instead of those approved by corporate IT departments.
In addition, TrackVia found that:
- Less than a quarter of Millennials (22 percent) think that BYOD/BYOA policies cause headaches for IT, but 40 percent of Baby Boomers do;
- 35 percent of Millennials use their own apps because the corporate apps can’t be used across different devices.
“Millennials are on target to make up the majority of the workforce by 2015,” Walker Fenton, TrackVia product SVP, was quoted as saying.
“What we found in our research is that Millennials not only prefer to use their own devices, but their own software as well. In many cases the software provided by their companies simply isn’t meeting their needs. In today’s ‘there’s an app for that’ world, Millennials know they can buy or build flexible, mobile, custom solutions to be more efficient and productive.”
TrackVia is capitalizing on the trend. The Denver-based company offers a do-it-yourself application platform that enables business users to build apps quickly without any programming skills. As the company states, “We empower people to quickly build custom apps to run their departments or their entire business with no programming required. We refer to building apps with clicks, not code, and deploying apps in days, not months.”
