Consumer Technologies Creep into the Enterprise

by Jason Compton, Techweb

Web surfing, USB flash storage and blogs were first introduced to many companies by their employees–mostly young and tech savvy. As technology becomes a bigger part of daily life, corporate IT departments must keep pace, or risk being seen as laggards or even control freaks. And while most consumer–driven technologies rarely come with enterprise–grade security, they often solve problems more quickly and elegantly than many button–downed internal applications. The best IT strategy is to stay ahead of the curve.

Genworth Financial has kept consumer–driven technology drift in check by adopting those that it thinks will help productivity. It has deployed wikis and other collaborative software for internal use and is ramping up its focus on instant videoconferencing among Genworth employees. All of these developments began this year after the company's CEO, Michael Fraizer, emphasized the need for better internal communication. "One of the key challenges issued by our CEO was to be more collaborative and work together better," says Mike McGarry, Genworth CTO. Since the web team had already been studying Web 2.0, "we quickly did some strategic thinking," he says.

McGarry decided to pilot wiki, social network and videoconferencing applications among new hires, but quickly released the applications enterprisewide. The new tools are already being credited with travel cost savings for the sales team and, with breaking down barriers between geographic regions. "A recent testimonial came from one of my administrators in Leone, Mexico, who needed help with server monitoring. He was able to use our social networking site to quickly find an internal knowledge expert," McGarry says. "We're routinely being thanked for helping our people find ways to solve problems more easily."

If IT leaders don't embrace the most important consumer–driven technologies, they risk being cut out of the discussion. Increasingly, "software is being driven by companies like Google, going straight to the end user and saying, 'Here are these new and valuable services, which are faster and cheaper to deploy'–and which circumvent the IT function," says Matthew Brown, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Albert C. Lee, executive director of IT at New York Media, says: "You can block certain sites and try to lock [them] down, but then you have retention issues and unhappy people." Lee says a balance needs to be reached between having enough security and access control to stay safe and accepting "that certain things are going to happen beyond your control."

IT leaders should be prepared to amend policies and standards to better meet the realities disruptive technology can bring. "If you're building a Facebook widget, you shouldn't have an eight–month development cycle. It's just not appropriate," Lee says. "Users have come to expect that there's a certain level of quality that comes from a widget. They're not meant to solve the world's problems."