Over the last few years, two of our research domains have been of particularly high interest across our client base: Consumerization and Business Relationship Management (BRM). The former helps clients understand how today's ever-rising wave of new consumer-driven technologies – mobility, Software-as-a-Service, cloud computing, social networking etc. – is re-shaping the large modern organization. The latter has been examining the changing business/IT relationship at a time when information technology is becoming pervasive across the firm.

Thus far, these two streams of research have been integrated mostly at a thematic level. Clearly, consumerization (and related issues of employee empowerment) is one of the main reasons why business/IT relationship dynamics are changing. But until now, we haven't formally linked specific consumerization possibilities into our core BRM models, and their associated roles and skills. This will be one of the goals of our 2010 research.