Meanwhile, back at the farm

I thought it would be nice for me to brain dump many of the things on my mind lately. Each of these deserves, and will probably end up as, a full blog post. But for now, I just want to get them down.

Consumerization of IT

Last week I attended the Partners in Business Lecture Seminar at Utah State University in Logan. I went very skeptical that I would learn much, but I walked away with many new ideas. One of the big ideas was the idea of the “consumerization of IT”. This is not a new concept, but it was new to me. I’ve been asked to participate with a taskforce at BYU-Idaho that was setup to view current policy for what technology is approved for use in the classroom and make recommendations for new policies. The ideas around the consumerization of IT have really helped me understand what is really going on. What is the “consumerization of IT”? Wikipedia to the rescue:

Consumerization is a stable neologism that describes the trend for technology companies to bring new technology to the consumer market ahead of business markets. Resulting in a switch of technology power from the work place to the home. Most employees are now finding that their home based IT is more capable than that provided in their workplace. The term popularized by John Taylor and Douglas Neal of CSC’s Leading Edge Forum is one of the transforming drivers of Web 2.0

If that doesn’t mean anything to you, consider the problem that IT faces. Traditionally, IT has had full control over the software and hardware that organizations use on a day-to-day basis (well, for the most part; Craig Burton has an interesting analysis that shows employees have been bringing their own technology for a long time). With the soaring adoption rates of online applications in the home, users are desiring to use these online applications at work. Because there are no existing ways for IT to provide governance over these applications and the data that they hold this trend poses increased risk to the enterprise. In fact, Rob Clyde, CTO of Symantec at the conference stated that it is a problem without a solution at the current time.

Consumerization of IT Management Framework

My conclusions on the consumerization are that this is a trend that is not going to stop any time soon. Rather than develop restraining and comprehensive policies that restrict employees from using online applications and cloud based services, IT needs to take a more minimalist approach. As part of the taskforce, I’m proposing a framework for handling the usage of online and cloud based applications. The framework rests on three core principles:

• Real-time Policy Development & Education
• Digital Citizenship
• Minimalistic Governance

I’ll be working on an essay that I will post here that will explain these pillars in detail and an example of how technology can aid in implementing the pillars within an organization.