IT Consumerization – Déjà Vu All Over Again

Posted July 11th, 2008 by Dennis Powell

I ran across an interesting post entitled Analysis: IT consumerization and the future of work by Jon Stokes, Senior Editor and co-founder of ars technica.

Let me quote from John’s concluding paragraph to set the stage for this post:

“Ultimately, the Web as a software stack is robust enough to deliver networked apps and messaging, and consumer-level hardware is robust enough to handle the consequences of working remotely (encryption) and using your own hardware (virtualization), so both of these factors will make consumerized IT and BYOH models increasingly compelling for users—not necessarily IT departments, but end users themselves. And it’s the growing pool of technically savvy, mobile, job-hopping end users who will increasingly demand that IT departments adapt to the way that they work, and not vice versa.”

There are good reasons (oh… like security) why IT can’t simply open the ol’ server ports to any networked app that happens to be popular with the “mobile, job-hopping” end user community. But this is IT history repeating itself. What we’re witnessing today – i.e. the push by users to drive innovation into the data center - has happened over and over. Do any of you remember the early 80’s ‘collapse’ of the glass house, when central IT was forced by the business unit to extend or even replace big iron in favor of client/server deployments… and the advent of the PowerBuilder™ GUI set who RADed their way right past those lovely dumb-terminal “green-screens”?

Once again, the user community is forcing IT to adapt, this time to the technology of the social network. Is this a flaw of IT service management (ITSM)? Not when ITSM helps align IT with business needs. Do IT personnel lack an understanding new technology? Nope. IT personnel are very often technology power users outside of the data center. Well, what is the cause of this gap between the cutting edge end-user and the IT department?

In my humble opinion, it’s two-fold.

The sheer complexity of technology implementation is a large anchor suppressing IT-driven innovation, and the lack of innovative ITSM tools greatly contributes to IT’s pragmatism.

Any user community pushing for new technology would certainly be more cautious if their job was on the line in regard to successful technology implementation. It’s a wee bit less complex to “introduce” a consumer-level product to your cubicle, section, or even department than it is to understand, adopt, deploy, maintain, change, train people to use, and support that same new technology for thousands of internal and external users across a mix of platforms on a regional and global scale – not to mention making new stuff work with existing stuff – all the while keeping the current production systems humming right along.

Consider the challenge of change management – IT routinely must respond to volumes of requests for change (RFC) from a broad and diverse user base. Our research (see past StackSafe blogs) reports that IT often must resort to smoke-tests, component testing, and “patch-and-pray” to process the volume of RFCs.

As a result, 25% of all changes made to production cause problems, and IT must roll back 10% of all changes because of unresolved problems. This can be directly mapped to the complexity of the technology infrastructure, not to mention all that wonderful new stuff that IT is pushed to add to production. IT organizations can improve their testing maturity through process improvements. For example, they can adopt change management best practices, build and maintain representative staging environments, test all changes, test changes end-to-end, and schedule changes.

IT process improvements are always beneficial in theory, but IT rarely has innovative IT tools available to streamline more rigorous process execution. As a result, IT expends extra time and effort improving their control over current technology that could be used to introduce the very cutting-edge technologies for which their user community is clamoring.