Gartner analysts predict there will be a large-scale shift in technology influence toward consumers and away from central corporate IT departments.
In a keynote speech on Monday, Gartner's director of global research, Peter Sondergaard, warned conference attendees that consumerization will be the most significant trend to have an impact on IT over the next 10 years. "We stand at the foot of a new high tide," Sondergaard said. "There is a shift in technology ownership." Sondergaard argued that consumers already have a great deal of power over how services and technologies are configured and used.
"Consumers are rapidly creating personal IT architectures capable of running corporate-style IT architectures," he said. "They have faster processors, more storage and more bandwidth."
He advised corporate IT executives to adapt to the changes and prepare for what he called "digital natives," or people so fully immersed in digital culture that they are unconcerned about the effects of their technology choices on the organizations that employ them.
The encroachment of Web 2.0 into the business world, sometimes referred to as "Enterprise 2.0," was a common theme running.
Mashup apps
In a paper prepared by Gene Phifer, David Mitchell Smith and Ray Valdes, Gartner researchers noted that corporate IT departments historically have lagged behind popular technology waves, such as the arrival of graphical user interfaces and the Internet in business.
They argued that the biggest impacts of Web 2.0 within enterprises are collaboration technologies--notably blogs, wikis and social networking sites--and programmable Web sites that allow business users to create mashup applications.
"Mashups are beginning to see corporate deployment, especially in companies that need to relay geographic information to their users (for example, store locations to customers)," according to the report.
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