A key dimension of social business is the social reorientation of work, wealth creation and prosperity. This has been a top theme of Colabria Action Research. The major enterprise revolution is a subtext of the next Colabria Cluster, Emerging Enterprise Technology, on 16 January 2014 in San Francisco, California. Once an IT backwater, The Social Enterprise has reached critical mass, its tipping point.
Source: Consumerization @ Wikipedia
A major plank of this fundamental transformation is consumerization – the unstoppable impact of consumer technologies on enterprise IT. New, practical and pervasive consumer technologies are create enormous advantages for enterprise IT and social business. Long considered taboo, employees’ personal consumer technology and appliances are setting the IT agenda and driving procurement cycles.
After years of advocating this critical trend it is rewarding to see it going mainstream. Enterprise IT has a dismal record of selecting applications and technologies that propel business forward. Even in the age of consumerization Enterprise IT still clings to legacy models for selection technologies. These are often based on politics, vendor lock-in, tradition, cronyism, etc. Even as recent as this month respected industry ‘thought leaders’ were making this dubious claim, “…traditional research houses (Gartner, Forrester, IDC) are still the strongest sources of unbiased insights and strategic guidance on large enterprise software.”
Sorry, but these methods are a vain attempt to cling on to what little control still exists with IT management. Enterprise software procurement is changing fast. It depends on users and what they will use not what they are told to use. It is complex, emergent, self-organized and fast moving. The traditional five-year IT cycles are gone forever.
See Enterprise Software Research from Colabria for further background. Wikipedia and other Web sources offer good treatment of consumerization. Remember, there are two distinct types of business IT leaders in today’s new world of consumerization: the quick and the dead.
