On the one hand, it’s all been gratifying. We have been saying for many years that it was inevitable that employees would increasingly own and manage their personal technologies, and that corporate control over employee IT would recede. While many have been sceptical, during 2012 this view has become the conventional wisdom, with one giant firm after another launching various Bring Your Own (BYO) programmes. Industry conferences and the associated punditry have quickly followed suit.

Today, the combination of powerful consumer technologies and Marketing-IT co-evolution presents business leaders with a major opportunity to expand their areas of expertise and fully participate in some of the most exciting and rapidly growing segments of the IT industry. Perhaps only smart products and the internet of things rival marketing technology in terms of potential business and societal impact.

What does it mean for a business to be outside-in – to really be driven by marketplace signals, needs and dynamics? It’s a question we have been thinking about a lot recently, as digital technology creates new ways to listen to the market and rapidly respond to change.

Following our research into the Future of Retained IT which identified four emerging new models for Enterprise IT, my research over the last few months has drilled deeper into one of these models – the 'Process Manager' (PM) – particularly considering its relationship to business agility. The PM adds value to the firm by leveraging Enterprise IT's deep knowledge of business processes and improving the agility of the firm by applying existing platforms more effectively. To this end, I have interviewed many senior IT executives on the need to improve business agility in their organizations and adopt more of a 'plug and play' approach, especially as IT moves to the front of the firm.