Survey: U.S. workers willing to pay for own smartphones to work from anywhere

New survey data from Forrester Research reveals that 11 percent of U.S. information workers, otherwise known as iWorkers, use a smartphone at work. And those smartphone users are working from everywhere, Forrester said.

According to Forrester's 2009 Smartphones and Telecommuting: Workforce Technology Adoption 2009 report, 81 percent of iWorkers with smartphones work from home, 62 percent work while traveling and 64 percent use them at their office desks. Moreover, 29 percent of smartphone users interact three or more hours a day with their devices.

Another interesting finding: Many of of the 2,000 people surveyed are willing to pay the bill or at least part of it to gain access to corporate email and documents.

"The logic is clear," wrote principal analyst Ted Schadler in the report. "Smartphones and laptops unshackle work from location."

While iWorkers in the past were forced to use mobile devices to accomplish their jobs, Forrester's new survey results reveal that a third of respondents want to use their own mobile phones to get their jobs done.

Perhaps most encouraging for the enterprise, according to Forrester's analysis, is that teleworkers, on average, work two hours more per week than office workers. "Access to real applications from anywhere means more work in more places," Schadler said. "And that translates into higher productivity--or at least higher utilization of your IT investments."

In addition, the trend would allow the enterprise to "offload costs and responsibility for devices and plans to their employees...Giving information workers access to key corporate resources from any facility or from home and elsewhere raises the chances that they can find a key piece of information when it's most valuable: At the point of decision-making, and that translates into higher team productivity."

For more:
- see this Computerworld article

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