Gartner: Prepare for consumer-led IT

Gartner analysts on Monday predicted a large-scale shift in technology influence toward consumers and away from central corporate IT departments.

The corporate technology research company this week is hosting Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., where analysts are presenting research on the "consumerization" of IT.

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 impact IT over the next 10 years.

"We stand at the foot of a new high tide," said Sondergaard. "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," said Sondergaard. "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," is a common theme running through other Gartner presentations made available on Monday.

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 graphical user interfaces and the Internet in business.

Mashup apps
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)," the report said.

"Mashups are relatively easy to build and they use established Web resources, REST/(Representational State Transfer)/POX (plain old XML) and scripting languages to deliver new and unique views into information. Unfortunately, many Web sites used in mashups are beta in nature and service-level agreements (SLAs) (to ensure predictable performance) are usually unavailable."

Gartner also predicted that 80 percent of Web applications will use AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a style of building interactive Web applications that is becoming popular.

The research company ultimately a recommended that IT executives embrace changes from the consumer Web while focusing on their job as a central IT group.