The trend toward supporting corporate applications on employee-owned notebooks and smartphones is already under way in many organizations and will become commonplace within four years. The main driver for adoption of mobile devices will be employees — i.e., individuals who prefer to use private consumer smartphones or notebooks for business, rather than using old-style limited enterprise devices. IT is set to enter the next phase of the consumerization trend, in which the attention of users and IT organizations shifts from devices, infrastructure and applications to information and interaction with peers. This change in view will herald the start of the postconsumerization era.
This is a really, really significant shift in what organizational IT is about. Smart IT Directors and CIOs will get this. The ones that don't will likely not be IT Directors and CIOs for long.
In short, the role of IT will change from being a primarily infrastructure engineering role to being one of facilitating access to information and enabling relationships. The mechanisms for doing this will be mobile, consumer devices (often owned by employees themselves), cloud-delivered applications (SaaS) and corporate use of social media for something other than marketing. Most of the old infrastructure engineering tasks are going to move out of the hands of on-site IT people and into the hands of service providers.
The most radical change is going to come for people in small to medium size IT operations, who in my experience are the ones least in touch with this, and the most entrenched in a more traditional model of IT. Unfortunately, IT staff in small to mid-sized organizations are also the less likely to have the skills to either become the facilitators I mention above, or to move on to high-skill infrastructure engineering positions with service providers.