Why We Should Care of IT Consumerization

Looking into my agenda for the next couple of weeks, I’ve BYOD, Enterprise Single Sign O, IaaS together with Big Data and Social Analytics engine with Tabular models. Well, something is happening outside, the pace of innovation is raising and technologies are coming fastest than ever increasing the pressure on IT.

Questioning about the reasons behind this sparkling landscape, I’ve found a plausible explanation in the IT Consumerization paradigm which is the tendency for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market. At first glance I thought that everything was about a mountain of mobile devices used by a bunch of teenagers running their FaceBook everywhere but as you can imagine, real implications are wider and disruptive.

I consider the most interesting ones from an IT point-of-view:
1) Social Networks are not applications but new communication channels. Digital Natives uses the Wall as their primary communication tool rather than classic email. Smart-Phones aren’t tools for speaking but to stay connected to the Net.
2) Internet Social Applications support integration: people authenticate on FaceBook and then jump to TripAdvisor and Skype reusing identities and living a fluid and vibratic experience shuffling Apps and Widgets together. Applications suggest us friends, books, group and other awesome Apps and ….they simply hit! Why can we do such amazing things on public social networks while it’s prohibited from daily business systems?
3) Mobile momentum gave us the App metaphor with a multitude of public or private Stores made available. The wake is growing and amplified with the new Windows 8 bringing this paradigm to desktop and followed by SalesForce and SharePoint 2013 doing the same on SaaS and Portals. Application Lifecycle is dramatically reduced while choice is huge.

There are many insights we can derive as IT and common cliché such as business no longer needs of IT to handle that key technologies since they are commodity now, but I would say that since technologies are turning to be commodities available to every company, the way in which they are effectively and timely used to run a business is the competitive advantage and the challenge for 2020 IT.