Power shifts to the consumer

This year's Gartner Symposium, which kicked off yesterday at the Cape Town International Conference Centre, focuses on the 'consumerisation' of IT.

The message? IT end-users have the tools, devices, content and bandwidth available to severely disrupt a business, and they will, from within.

Said Gartner Research head Peter Sondergaard, speaking in the opening keynote: "The consumerisation of IT has to do with how users get access to content, how this increases the user's power, and how they will interact with organisations as employees, and as customers, as a result."

Gartner Research VP Debra Logan highlighted the same trend in her opening talk: "The consumerisation of IT will be the most important of the defining trends we face. It will lead to a number of changes that will impact all of us, in the IT organisation, the broader organisation and society at large. As new technologies and software are developed, new delivery models that originate in the consumer space are seeping inwards to affect how IT happens inside the organisation.

"There is growing availability of low-cost easy to use devices," she said, "and ubiquitous, affordable and pervasive communications infrastructure. These two have led to an explosion of content - information, entertainment content, services and applications content."

How will this affect SA? "The consumerisation of IT is happening now," she stated, "and sooner or later it is going to happen to your organisation. Why does it matter? For three reasons: A combination of device ubiquity, ubiquity of networks and the content explosion, which is only going to get bigger.

"These three things - but mainly the content - will destabilise everything. The combination of these three will destabilise the balance of power between the state, enterprises and consumers. Technology is no longer scarce. We are no longer a priesthood, or gurus.

"Affordable access to technology and content significantly increases the power of the user - they can use this to interact with organisations in any way they want, both as an employee and as a customer."

As users exercise their freedom of choice, they are building powerful infrastructure networks outside of organisational infrastructures; for example, using their own devices, own connections, own e-mail addresses, blogs, social networking tools. "We must recognise this, and we must match users' expectations and behaviours [inside the organisation]."