Food for thought. What is IT Consumerization?

IT consumerization (information technology consumerization)

IT consumerization is the blending of personal and business use of technology devices and applications.

In today's enterprise, the consumerization of IT is being pushed by a younger, more mobile workforce, who grew up with the Internet and are less inclined to draw a line between corporate and personal technology. Employees have good technology at home and they expect to be able to use it at work too. This blending of personal and business technology is having a significant impact on corporate IT departments, which traditionally issue and control the technology that employees use to do their jobs. Consequently, IT departments are faced with deciding how to protect their networks and manage technology that they perhaps did not procure or provision.

The label IT consumerization has been around since at least 2005 when Gartner Inc. pronounced consumerization "the most significant trend affecting IT in the next 10 years." Gartner traced the trend to the dot-com collapse, when enterprise IT budgets shrank and many IT vendors shifted focus to the potentially bigger consumer IT markets. The result has been a change in the way technology enters the marketplace. Instead of new technology flowing down from business to the consumer, as it did with the desktop computer, the flow has reversed and the consumer market often gets new technology before it enters the enterprise.