Decentralizing IT

This week I gave a private talk to an investment bank that was touring the west coast to hear public company pitches. As we were setting up, someone asked about my PowerBook. I pointed out that since I switched it hasn't crashed or caught a virus and simply runs everything I need (especially as the most important apps are web-native). The real point is that supports my lifestyle and how I want to mix with media.

Jonathan Schwartz traces the trend of decentralization of IT decision making from CEO to CIO to IT staff to user.

Does constantly being within reach of the network cause your work to follow you home - or allow you to take your personal life to work? Either way you answer, I'd argue the latter phenomena is one of the most important trends in the technology industry. And has been for more than twenty years...

Thus began the PC revolution, which put many CIO's and IT staffs into a defensive mode of reacting to the needs of the workforce - it was enormously empowering for employees, and a royal pain for CIO's...

Why? Over time, employees brought PC's into their lives - for budgets, for taxes, for letters and gaming. And that started driving IT decisions - in that employees weren't just bringing work home - they were bringing their home life to work. How many PC's in your enterprise have CD players? How many of your employees look at consumer web sites at work (can you imagine watching the news at work 30 years ago vs. peeking at cnn.com today)? Do you limit your daily email to colleagues and customers? Ever IM at work? 10 years ago, the consumer eCommerce wave began - has it had an impact on the enterprise? Clearly...

And continuing that trend, think about the following: who picked the search engine you use most often? It wasn't your CIO. Yet is a search engine a part of your business toolbox? Certainly, yes. And who picked your cell phone? Likely not your CIO, either - yet do you use it for business purposes? Surely, yes. And given that over a billion were sold last year - to a vast population (some 58% (!) of the US population, says the Yankee Group in the New York Times last week). Many of those buyers had jobs. And there's no doubt mobility will have a growing impact on IT infrastructure (accelerated by its security attributes, in my mind, but that's a separate blog). The era of command and control has come to an end. Long live massively scaled shared services...

Its a great read. Harkens back to a year ago when Steve Gillmor asked Jonathan in an interview about the whole consumer impact as a seeding tool for enterprise infrastructure. While the trend is quite blogged, I agree with Jonathan on its significance and the implications need to be explored further.

Its more than consumers being an inroad into the enterprise from the bottom-up, its users becoming developers and influencers Another dimension is DIYIT or what Doc would call the demand side supplying itself.

One aspect is that the people previously known as consumers can not only source and modify their own tools if IT fails to serve them -- but arm themselves with information to influence what should be group decisions. Especially as social agreement on how to use a tool is a determining factor for realizing productivity gains.