Over the last few weeks, we have hosted two client conferences: Cloud Computing on 18 November in London, and The Changing Nature of Work on 1 December in Falls Church, Virginia. Both events featured powerful examples of customers using modern consumer technologies for real business advantage.

LEF clients know that we have been promoting the savings, effectiveness and agility of consumerized IT products and services for many years. But 2010 may well be a tipping point in terms of the acceptance of this thinking within the enterprise IT community. In this commentary, we will briefly summarize five of the most compelling stories we have heard. (LEF clients can view the conference presentation materials on our web site: www.lef.csc.com/events-page/events-archive)

• Moving to Gmail. It’s no secret that the entire State of California is under severe financial pressure. This, and an outdated Novell GroupWise environment, were the key drivers of the City of Los Angeles’ decision to migrate (with the support of CSC) to Google Mail for all of its 30,000 employees, making it the largest government Gmail initiative we are aware of. The City of Los Angeles CTO, Randi Levin, described many difficult challenges – migration, unions, security, compliance, retraining, etc. – that were not easy to overcome. But the city has saved millions of dollars, and employees are now rapidly adopting Google’s document sharing and collaboration features. Governments all around the world are watching, and can certainly learn from Randi’s pioneering leadership and experience.
• Implementing an employee Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) programme. When Cardinal Health took a hard, data-driven look at its mobile technology governance, it didn’t like what it saw: too many exceptions to its device/service 'standards', clear cases of improper usage, growing demand for iPhones and Androids, and rising overall costs. The CIO (and LEF advisory board member) Patty Morrison led management to approve a new paradigm, where for most employees 24/7 availability requires only a mobile phone service, not mobile data. These employees were given a $40 per month mobile service stipend which they could put toward the device/service package they prefer. The programme has resulted in significant cost savings, and (after some initial grumbling) is now very popular with employees, many of whom are topping up the company plan with their own money to get the technology they really want. Patty plans to expand the BYOT concept to PCs as well.
• Rapid crisis response. The recent giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico generated what must be the largest crisis response effort in business history. The BP CIO of Exploration and Production, Mark Bouzek, told a powerful, and not sufficiently well-known, story, of IT’s central role in supporting BP’s massive communication and coordination requirements: six command centres, 48,000 people, 7,000 vessels, 120 aircraft, dozens of business/technology partners, local, state and national governments, etc. The use of standard consumer technologies and a 'Big Internet Café' architecture enabled the speed and empowerment needed in this most demanding of business, political and technological environments, significantly changing the way that the IT organization is seen within the firm. As this work winds down, Mark identified many lessons about how IT can be better used and managed in the future.
• Lowering the barriers to innovation. By reducing IT costs, cloud computing can change the elasticity of IT demand, making projects feasible that would not have been affordable before. This was the key message of Warren Burns, Head of Technology Discovery at Unilever. Warren used the example of business analytics across Unilever's millions of in-store ice-cream refrigerators. By adding sensors and 3G networking, Unilever has been able to monitor individual machine activity in real time. The company was able to turn its instinct about how cabinets are used into hard data insights, driving changes that will help this business grow in the future. The costs of the Amazon-based IT infrastructure needed to support these monitoring capabilities is trivial – just 0.12% of the overall project cost. Eliminating high, fixed IT costs makes new ideas and experiments much less risky.
• Cloud computing for peak load capacity. Media companies typically have unusually uneven processing requirements. Demand can spike dramatically for a few hours or even just a few minutes. This makes these firms particularly well suited to the inherent scalability of cloud computing services. Bob Harris, CTO of Channel 4 (one of the major UK television channels), discussed how, after a thorough investigation and trial period, Channel 4 has become an enthusiastic Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer. While there were the usual real and imagined barriers to cloud computing adoption – control, security, reliability, legal, licensing, cultural, etc. – the advantages have been clear, and AWS usage has expanded rapidly. Future use is likely to include back-up, analytics, disaster recovery, development and testing, and other areas.

While each case is clearly compelling in and of itself, taken together they tell an additional story. In each organization, the decision to use consumerized technology stemmed from a very different motivation: steep cost cutting, improved governance, rapid crisis response, business analytics, and meeting peak load demands. Yet in each case the results were similar: the more consumerized approach proved not just well suited to the specific business requirement, but it also became very popular with employees, making it easier for each organization to be open to even more change in the future.

As always, we are immensely grateful to those customers willing to share their experiences and learnings. The stories presented by Randi, Patty, Mark, Warren and Bob are some of the most compelling we have heard. That they are all happening now and that each comes from a very different industry sector is just the latest evidence that the consumerization movement has moved well beyond the bleeding edge and is now gaining serious enterprise acceptance.