Hands off, IT: 5 key technologies users must own

Most people I talk with conflate consumerization of IT with the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon ascribed to the iPhone and iPad users. That’s hardly the case. In fact, the consumerization phenomenon predates the iPhone by many years.

I’d argue that Salesforce.com was the first big consumerization push into business, as the SaaS provider actively targeted business users and avoided IT in trying to get its technology adopted. Remember all those “No software” ads? They weren’t meant to appeal to IT. You could even argue the Internet and its unrestrained access to the world at large was the first consumerization “weapon” — or the PC before that.

[ Learn about consumerization of IT in person March 4-6, 2012, at IDG’s CITE conference in San Francisco. | Get expert advice about planning and implementing your BYOD strategy with InfoWorld’s 29-page “Mobile and BYOD Deep Dive” PDF special report. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobilize newsletter. ]

Regardless of which innovation was the first to empower individual users technologically, it’s clear that consumerization of IT is about user-driven technology of all sorts. BYOD has the distinction of being so visible and inexorable that it finally forced the consumerization trend into the open, with CIOs and IT publicly confronting an issue that many had been dealing with quietly for a while: Some technologies are truly user-centric and should be left as such.

Others have implications on the back end, where IT needs to be involved. Often, however, IT is told or tempted to get involved in every technology, which is a Sisyphean task it can’t afford. IT must step back, first to understand what technologies users are owning and to determine where which really need IT involvement.

What technologies precisely are those in the empowered employees’ quiver? There are five: mobile devices, cloud computing services, social technology, exploratory analytics, and specialty apps (that is, apps for the user’s specific job, from presentation software to engineering calculators). Some research firms don’t include the last one, and some add video to the mix — a perennial prediction that’s simply a communications format and not a tool in its own right like the others.

The list is short, but the tools that fall into these categories are many. If IT realized these categories, it might be better able to anticipate where user-driven technologies will come into play, as well as understand the underlying rationale for them. For example, smartphones and tablets make information of all varieties more accessible, they make computing more portable, and they make all sorts of communication easier in more contexts. Exploratory analytics — especially when tapping into external unstructured data and big data sources to supplement the knowledge kept within the company — let business users look for and theorize about possible market shifts and opportunities that maybe would increase revenues or decrease expenses.

The common aspect is the individual nature These technologies share two key aspects.

For starters, they’re very personal, with users choosing the ones that fit their work style, user experience preferences, and ways of thinking. IT often ignores the fact that people think differently, and that artisans of all stripes have always had personal favorite tools that simply work better for them — or seem to, which is the same thing at the end of the day. Just as chefs and construction workers, doctors and sculptors have favorite tools that both reflect them and extend them, so too now can information workers. That’s why you get heated arguments over Android versus iOS, or folks who swear by mind mapping and those who just don’t get it. They’re all right because they’re all different.

The other common aspect is that they are all directly applied to the work at hand. They’re front-end technlogies, not back-end ones. Individuals use them to accomplish what they’ve been hired to accomplish, and that individual ownership — expertise, really — reflects the person’s history and experiences that have made him or her good at the job.

In other words, they are idiosyncratic technologies — very much the oppoosite of the standardized, almost robotic technologies that IT has been tasked to deliver in the name of efficiency and repeatability, which is why there is often such a clash between IT and empowered users.

With that in mind, all of a sudden IT can see that these tools are not ignorant choices or trivial demands, though they may seem so at times — but that’s beside the point. Instead, they are reflections of the individual and his or her approach to work. That’s the point: users choosing tools they believe help them do better at whatever they do.

Understanding this nature of consumerized technology can help IT distinguish the tools as expressions of individuals from the underlying principles and common actions that IT can deliver, aid, and augment through back-end technologies and through flexible governance around data and processes. And it can help both business and IT pros get past the control divide by realizing that like everything else, the technologies in use cover a range from highly specialzied and individual to highly standardized and universal.

Beware smothering individual tools with larger systems Where IT also has to be careful is in trying to wrap these individual technologies in a blanket of back-end technologies. In many cases, it will smother the tools’ individual, local nature — and cost a lot of money and time in the process. In other cases, it’s easy to create parallel information systems — one for “regular” IT and one for “consumerized” IT — and end up with a big mess. For example, Forrester Research recently identified 16 technologies to support consumerization. To me, the list is misguided, proposing more areas where IT can spend money and time in an era when budgets are shrinking and demands on IT are already too high.

Here’s what Forrester suggests IT should look into: business collaboration, client management suites, file syncing, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), innovation management and ideation platforms, mobile device management (MDM), platform as a service (PaaS), productivity, public social media, security and identity management, self-service BI, smartphones, social marketing management tools, tablets, videoconferencing, and video platforms.

Some elements on that list have long been or should be in IT’s charter: business collaboration, client management suites, file syncing, IaaS, mobile device management (which is just an aspect of overall client management), PaaS, security and identity management, and self-service BI. These are all platform technologies that either enable or govern enterprisewide activities. Certainly there are aspects of these — I’m thinking cloud and multidevice file sharing — where IT can help adjust to new use cases and new endpoints, but they should not be treated as divorced from traditional information technologies and processes.

Other elements are faddish: innovation management and ideation platforms, videoconferencing, and video platforms. I’ve been hearing about the promise of video chats and video in business for two decades — they can have their place, but they are niche technologies that should get only niche attention, probably at the department level. Innovation platforms come and go in terms of vendor attention; there are some industries where they can be helpful, assuming there is an innovation process to be aided through technology, but in many more situations, they are just more process for the sake of process.

Most of the others are not and should not be IT’s concern per se — I’m thinking smartphones, tablets, and even so-called productivity tools, which are really job-specific tools. IT’s job is to set the policies for access control, user authentication, information flow, and so forth — not to worry about the endpoint devices as long as they meet the policies.

Finally, there are the two special cases: public social media and social marketing management tools. Both can be considered departmental technologies that IT could manage or simply defer to an outsourcer or cloud provider, focusing IT’s role on governance and data integration issues. In the 1990s, most large enterprises quashed the notion of departmental computing, as it led to duplication of infrastructure and breaks in information flow and process flow. But sometimes, organizations also blew up or absorbed truly departmental functions into bigger tools where they lost their focus.

Social media and social marketing are specialty activities, like HR management tools, accounting tools, and chemical analysis tools. They may hook into a common communications back end, get data from a common ERP or CRM system — what IT should own and manage — but the tools and processes related to the specialized social tasks belong in the business unit charged with social and marketing activities. These are the kinds of areas where IT and individuals have to ally, because both are needed for different aspects of the technology.

Consumerization is not a black-and-white phenomenon, and how to handle the technologies that empowered users requires more than a black-and-white solution.

This article, “Hands off, IT: 5 key technologies users must own,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.