It wasn’t that long ago that most of the computer technology used by people was provided by their employers. It started out being desktop systems physically located at their offices. Everything installed on these computers was work related. They connected to corporate services via an internal network, and accessed the internet in a controlled way through corporate firewalls.

As the workplace became more distributed and mobile, computing shifted over more to laptops. Since these systems were with people all the time, they started to get used for both work and personal things. Access to the internet became open, with people connecting via their home networks and public hot spots. To accommodate these mobile workers, internal corporate systems started shifting to browser based interfaces, letting them access these systems via secure connections back to the corporate network. Many corporations also supplied phones to these mobile workers – typically RIM Blackberries – to let them make calls and access email. In total, it was a fairly complete set of corporate sponsored tools.

But then a few interesting things happened:

• Laptop prices dropped dramatically, fueled in part by the popularity of very low cost netbooks.
• Apple introduced the iPhone and AppStore.
• Social networking tools became a popular way to communicate.
• Free, cloud based services expanded the range of capabilities available to people.

As laptop prices fell, people started to purchase their own systems to use. Some wanted to use MacBooks instead of corporate provided windows systems. Others wanted systems that had specific features or form factors not offered by their organizations. Instead of finding ways to squeeze the applications and services they personally wanted onto the systems supplied by their companies, these users flipped the model – looking at ways to integrate what they needed to do for work onto their personal systems.

The introduction of the iPhone continued the push away from corporate sponsored systems. The iPhone was the first mobile phone to offer a real browser, and people quickly gravitated to the promise of having the real internet available on something they could slip in their pocket. Despite little initial interest by IT departments to support the iPhone, people simply bought their own and used them for both work and personal needs. The introduction of the App Store a year later cemented the iPhone as a true mobile productivity platform, making it the smartphone everyone wanted to have.

Along side these developments, social networking started to grow in importance as a viable channel for people to communicate across. This led to more sophisticated social applications appearing – both on mobile platforms as well as PC’s – making social networking a practical tool for professional users as well as consumers. However, outside of cost saving tools like Skype, corporations have typically been slow to bring social applications into the sponsored fold.

Also during this period, cloud based applications started growing in both popularity and sophistication. Beyond the free emails services that had been popular for many years, this generation of cloud based services covered everything from comprehensive office productivity applications to services like CRM systems, cloud based disk storage, and even cloud hosted databases. Most were free or very low cost, and didn’t require technical sophistication on the part of users.

Collectively, these developments have had a real impact on the way employees view their corporate IT services, and where their expectations are now set.

People can now afford to buy their own equipment, and are comfortable using all of these tools on their own. There are now free or inexpensive applications and services available to these people that cover all the capabilities of their traditionally IT sponsored equivalents. There are also applications that people use on their own – like social networking – that aren’t yet being considered by most organizations.

In short, many people are now able to become their own IT providers, leveraging only a limited set of capabilities that are uniquely available from their employers. This represents a real shift in the ‘balance of power’ between users and their IT groups, and fundamentally blurs the role and mission of many corporate IT departments. Without acknowledging and adapting to the realities of this new environment, traditional IT departments run the risk of becoming irrelevant – or even worse, a liability to their organizations.