IT Departments Must Face the Reality of IT Consumerization

By Maria Bruno-Britz

Will the days of corporate IT's imperious reign over all matters tech-related soon end? When it comes to the immediate needs of the end-users within a company, it will. In fact, according to Yankee Group, it's already happening.A report from Yankee called Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management says that IT's control of enterprise applications and services is slipping because of the adoption of consumer technologies in the corporate environment, or consumerization of IT. In fact, the firm said that nearly 50 percent of employees said they felt more empowered than the IT department to control their personal IT environment at work. And it will create a mess if the techies don't handle things the right way.

This reminds me of my recent blog about iPods in the office. I guess when you get down to it, people's personal tech devices do have a way of wending their way into the office. USB drives come immediately to mind. Sometimes people bring their personal laptops to work and plug into the network. Who knows what kinds of security holes this practice opens?

Yankee says that IT cannot ignore this growing trend. Rather, it should embrace it and attempt to govern IT use not with an iron fist, but with a more cooperative approach-a customer care cooperative model that sets guidelines and steers users in the right direction.

In other words, it seems like IT workers will have to take the path of least resistance in order to maintain corporate policy and keep their own sanity. This might not necessarily be a bank tech problem, but it certainly does speak to the broader trend of how wired people's lives have become. This crosses all industries, including financial services.