Back in 2003, one of the first things we wrote about The Consumerization of the IT Industry was that it would be a process – a set of changes and dynamics that would take time to play out. For many decades, the information technology industry had been top-down, with large systems and large enterprises the primary focus of innovation. Such a huge and established order couldn't be inverted all in one go; new approaches would have to take hold and set new evolutionary processes in motion.

Since that time, we have sought to identify and articulate what the consumerization process would look like, and while the IT industry will always take surprising turns, we think the overall shape of change is now becoming clear. As shown in the figure below, consumerization is evolving in phases, but that it is well under way is no longer a matter of dispute. In this commentary, we will focus on the three main stages of change that we see and foresee at this point, and explain why we believe we are less than halfway through a journey whose most important phases are still to come.

Phase 1 – Browser-based applications. Remember the great browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape? While some might look back and say that all the hype and antitrust battling now seems silly, the emergence of a free, enterprise/consumer browser was really the first great sign that business and consumer IT would merge along consumerized lines. Since then, forward-thinking enterprises have been moving away from 'fat client' software, and toward network-dependent applications. Browser-based computing is what makes SaaS, web-based email, and most of the collaborative world of social media and Web 2.0 world possible. A few years from now, iTunes may well be seen as the last great client software application success, but even Apple will eventually seek to convert its nearly 200 million iTunes customers to a cloud- and browser-based service. This would largely complete Phase 1 of the journey.

Phase 2 – Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT). Once key applications are browser-based, it becomes possible to support nearly any internet-enabled device. In a world where Blackberries, iPhones, Droids, iPads, PCs and Macs all have their enthusiasts, device neutrality and shared decision rights will become increasingly necessary. Just as many firms expect mechanics to bring their own tools, so will they eventually stop selecting and providing employee computing devices. With key companies including Kraft, Unisys, CARFAX and others now running important tests, 2011 could be a turning point BYOT year. Few things would change the mission and culture of Enterprise IT more than getting out of the end-user device provisioning business. Universities proved the viability of this approach a long time ago. It is a defining phase of consumerization.

Phase 3 – Free, advertising-based services. In the end, consumerization and advertising (broadly defined) will likely prove inseparable. While modern computing environments such as those built by Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and others have many advantages over most legacy data centres, it's advertising that can enable order-of-magnitude cost savings and radical new business models. Of course, 'advertising' will take many innovative forms – entertainment, content, software, games, social networks, loyalty programmes, etc. It's really any activity where one party invests to get the attention of another, and it will increasingly provide the funding our industry needs to move forward into ever-higher forms of community interaction, collective intelligence and cloud-based services. Advertising-based services will also prove inseparable from what will be an increasingly customer-centric IT marketplace, with many implications for privacy, identity and personalization.

Many clients scoff at the idea of free services in the enterprise (just as many once scoffed at consumerization), but this seems short-sighted. If Google can deliver a quality email service, is it really such a big jump for firms to want to save even more money or even get free service, by allowing Google to serve up ads in the same anonymous way it does in its consumer markets? After all, employees already use advertising-supported Google search and mapping services in the enterprise every day. Is email really so different? As more and more free services emerge and are broadly accepted by large organizations, current prejudices will likely recede. It’s a potentially huge new frontier.

Conclusion

While timelines are always an over-simplification of complex and overlapping realities, they can provide a useful '50,000 foot' view. From this distance, we can see that Phase 1 is essentially complete; Phase 2 is just beginning its real world test phase; and Phase 3 is still not yet on the enterprise management radar. This means that we are probably somewhere between one-third and one-half of the way toward the pervasive consumerization of Enterprise IT. The timeline also reinforces our view that consumerization is a long-term process. The emergence of a standard consumer/enterprise browser goes back to the mid-1990s, while the BYOT movement is only now gathering significant enterprise experience. However, history tells us that once momentum builds, IT industry change can rapidly accelerate, and that future IT uses and applications (Phase 4?) will inevitably exceed our current vision of what is possible or likely. All this argues that the second half of the consumerization journey is likely to be much more dramatic than the first.