Office Work Is So Last Century, Forrester Reports

The days of IT workers going to the same office for work every day are apparently over, according to a new survey from Forrester Research.

Forrester surveyed nearly 5,000 information workers and found that fully 50% of them split time between their office and remote locations while 45% said they still worked at the office only. Unsurprisingly, Forrester also found that workers get more flexibility the higher they get up the totem pole as 63% of managers and supervisors and 87% of directors reported working in multiple locations, whereas only 40% of individual workers said they worked both at the office and remote locations. Forrester says it defines "remote locations" as either working from home or from an external location.

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Forrester's data on working from remote locations was just one of many interesting nuggets contained in its annual State of Workforce Technology adoption survey. Among other things, the survey found that 35% of information workers use their smartphones for work. Among these smartphone users, 48% said they chose their work smartphone "without considering what their company supports" while 29% chose their smartphone from a list of supported devices and 23% had their smartphone provided to them by their company.

BlackBerry devices were still the top smartphone in the information worker market, as 42% of smartphone users surveyed said they used a BlackBerry for work. Apple's iPhone accounted for 22% of worker smartphones while devices based on Google's open-source Android operating system accounted for 26% of worker smartphones. Smartphones in the enterprise apparently aren't being used for overly fancy or exotic applications, however, as email and work calendars were the only two smartphone applications that were used by more than half of IT smartphone users.

The survey also found that tablets were still scarcely used in the enterprise as only 11% of information workers said they used tablets in the workplace. Desktop computers were by far the most-used workplace device as 87% of workers surveyed said they used desktops during the workday. Laptops finished a distant second, as 51% of information workers surveyed said they used them during work.

Forrester conducted its survey online in May and surveyed 4,985 information workers employed by organizations of 20 employees or greater.

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This story, "Office Work Is So Last Century, Forrester Reports" was originally published by Network World.