Part 2 of my thoughts on the Consumerization of IT. Read Part 1 first if you can.

4) Technology has integrated work and life. Way back when I started in IT (late 1980’s), technology was distinct. There was work technology (mainframes, terminals, COBOL and disk drives bigger than any Subzero refrigerator) and there was life technology (Television, radio, Nintendo and the home phone). Sure they touched occasionally (when I got paged at 2am, I did use the home phone to call to see if I’d need to drive into the data center). Today, my tools are largely the same. My iPhone connects to friends and colleagues and even lets me fill out my expense report. I connect to friends, colleagues and clients over Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I rarely have to drive into the data center at 2am anymore. Is this a blessing or a curse? Sure, I find some work intruding into my personal time (answering an e-mail while sitting at a kid’s soccer game), but I also find my personal life intruding on my work time (what, you’ve never done a little Amazon shopping while on a slow paced conference call?). So for me, I’ll call it more blessing than a curse – I think net-net the technology has enriched both my personal and professional lives. I can’t wait to see what’s next!

5) Watch the young employees. If you are my age or older, you couldn’t use a mouse before you could walk. You probably first saw a computer as a teenager and couldn’t conceive of using one every day. Today, accommodating consumer-friendly technologies is fast becoming an accepted cost of doing business; if you do not have the latest technologies in your enterprise, then your most valuable current and prospective employees may go elsewhere. Opening the enterprise to consumer-driven technologies imposes new burdens on IT functions. Here’s an example: How do your enterprise applications leverage SMS (you know, that whole texting thing)? If your answer is “If SMS instantly disappeared worldwide tomorrow, we wouldn’t have to change a single application,” I’d say you’ve already missed the boat. Look how dominant SMS is in the consumer world – if you can’t see it, please find your nearest teenager. I don’t believe e-mail or laptops are going away, but if you don’t believe that they are going to be significantly less “central” to corporate IT, go get some eyewash – your head is deeply buried in the sand.

6) Mobility drives reengineering. Enterprise IT is receiving lots of requests to make corporate systems available on mobile platforms. If your company is like Accenture, you have hundreds (thousands?) of corporate applications. How do you decide what applications to make available on mobile platforms? OK, we’ve all done e-mail, what’s next? Since e-mail was simply ported from the desktop to mobile devices, many have looked to do the same with other enterprise applications. At Accenture, we have not focused on porting applications to mobile devices. We look at our applications and analyze what subset of functionality can best leverage the attributes of today’s mobile platforms – instant on, real-time, on-the-go, anytime, anywhere, small units of work, geo-awareness, etc. As an example, our first native iPhone application was for our time and expense system. Rather than port the whole application, we asked which features of the application could leverage the platform attributes above. Our answer? We focused on the expense reporting. Moving expense reporting from a batch process (end of the month, pull out all your receipts and start typing them in) to a real time process (I’m checking out of the hotel, let me key in the $112.55 from the Bethesda Marriott) has the opportunity to fundamentally change the way people manage and track their expenses. Once there, we added functions to allow the iPhone to take a picture of the receipt, saving the hassle of turning in the dreaded receipt envelope (disclaimer: not valid in all countries). So don’t port your applications, re-think your business processes.

7) Platform proliferation is back. And it will drive cost. Up. The bliss of the [relative] homogeneity that enterprises have enjoyed on end-user devices (a.k.a. Microsoft Windows) is gone. Not only has the browser landscape shifted, the device landscape has shifted. What was once Internet Explorer on Windows on Intel is now Internet Explorer/Firefox/Chrome/ Safari/Opera/Whatever on Windows/Linux/iOS/Android/Blackberry/Symbian/Whatever on Intel/God Knows What. The good news is that technology standards are more mature than they have ever been. You can actually build a functioning cross-browser application without large blocks of “if BroswerVersion==IE6, then...” Native mobile applications are not quite there yet but HTML5 will clearly ameliorate some (most?) of that. Accenture’s internal strategy is to focus on standards compliance and keep the vast majority of our apps browser-based to manage any cost multiplier for each platform.

Again, I welcome your comments. Come back in two weeks for the third and final installment of Ten Things I Think I Think About…The Consumerization of IT.