In our work on consumerization, we identified how the consumer market was providing employees with significant, but not necessarily complete, education in many information technologies. We expect that this new education could lead to insights and innovations in the use of information technology within firms, just at a time when businesses are hungry for innovation. The real benefit of technology is in its application and insights are not restricted to those who are professional technologists. We also went on to say that if this increased user understanding was not accompanied by increased responsibility, it would lead to frustration on the part of users that could be dangerous to the security of enterprise.

Our view was that the way out of this dilemma was to incrementally build trust with the users, or as Ronald Reagan famously said, “trust, but verify”. However, trust is the outcome of a series of positive interactions. It does not happen all at once. Moreover, users do not start all at the same level of understanding. There needs to be an approach that differentiates according to level of understanding while making clear a path for growth.

Having found what we thought was an effective approach to cope with one of the important and relentless effects of consumerization, we now need to help clients identify exactly what are the steps that let them proceed up a virtuous spiral of capability and responsibility to achieve a trusted relationship.