Organization such as Citrix are talking on their Synergy event about the ‘Cosumerization of IT, but what does it really mean ?
Up to a few years ago, IT was used to optimize all business processes and to optimize and simplify the work of employees. So IT automated about all business processes, except IT processes itself.
As a result, it is not so strange that IT has been seen for a long time as ‘a thing’ for geeks, which no one could understood what they actually where doing to make IT work.
If we look for example at the telecom industry, than we see that telecom services are already some decades a ‘commodity’ for all of us. Who is thinking what’s behind the 333 Hz tone when you pick up your phone and wants to dial a number ? Or what happens when you by a new SIMM card for a mobile phone and less than 1 hour later you can phone everyone in the world and everyone can reach you using your unique number and at the end of the month you receive a detailed invoice ?
I guess no one is thinking about the complexity of the systems behind the scenes, we all find it evident. It just works out of the box, that’s what we can call ‘Consumerization of technology’. It just works…
If people talk about the ‘Consumerization of IT’ it’s just that. You activate an IT service and it’s immediate available. To achieve this goal you need to build even a more complex system than current OSS/BSS* systems which are used in the Telecom industry to turn the telecom service into a commodity. It’s much more than installing technical systems by some geeks. It’s about building service oriented systems which are extreme scalable and have automated business logic allowing self service provisioning of the services.
This is what we have been building for the last couple of years allowing people to activate and use IT services, just as activating and using a mobile phone, or tapping water from the tap.
Using these services Anywhere, Anytime and allowing people to choose there own device, no matter if it’s a PC, Mac, IPAD or IPhone.. It just Works…
* OSS/BSS : Operational and business support systems
