These are times that pit the familiar against the new. These are times that ask us to chose between standardization and efficiency or creativity and agility. Companies need to decide what they want to become and chose their technology accordingly because the technology they use is what they will soon be (for better or for worse).

The availability and the functionality of consumer IT is growing exponentially and in many companies (probably most companies) there are already people using consumer IT to support their evolving business needs. And these people are not the officially designated enterprise architecture groups or systems integration groups; they’re business people doing things with Twitter, iPhones, Facebook, and various cloud computing applications and software-as-a-service offerings. If IT groups attempt to forbid their use, then people will just go underground and use them anyway. So (as the saying goes), if you can’t beat them, join them.

“You have to start with the premise that there is value in the use of consumer IT in business. Otherwise it’s going to be forced on you.” So said Ken O’Brien, CIO of RR Donnelley at a recent presentation he gave to the Chicago Chapter of the Society for Information Management. In his presentation Ken shared the process his IT organization uses to partner with business people and guide the use of consumer IT to support new business needs. RR Donnelley is the world’s largest printing and print services provider ($11.6 billion revenue in 2008) and it is in the midst of a far-reaching business transformation as it moves away from traditional printing operations and toward new electronic media and related services.

The core of the partnering process is summarized in a classification scheme they use to classify different kinds of consumer IT and define the value propositions they offer. The IT group has defined four quadrants for use in this classification process as shown in the figure below.

“We want people to come to us with their ideas,” said Ken, “we ask them to show us which quadrant a particular consumer IT application fits into and then we discuss the value proposition it could deliver.” Once someone has described the potential use of a consumer IT application and placed it in the relevant quadrant the IT group then investigates the security implications of employing a given consumer IT application for the proposed use. If the cost of securing an application so that it meets requirements for the proposed use is so great that it outweighs the benefits then the application is not implemented. But if security can be achieved at a reasonable cost then that technology is officially adopted by the IT group and implemented as a corporate standard and the IT group assists business people so they get the best use from it.

For instance, IT has helped a particular business unit use YouTube to manage its library of training videos and provide access to these videos to customers. They have helped other business units use Twitter and iPhone applications, and they have selected certain cloud service providers and worked to integrate their cloud infrastructure with relevant internal systems infrastructure.

There are other consumer IT applications such as Facebook that at this time cannot be adequately secured; so they haven’t been approved. “It’s scary how open Facebook is. We need to see better security options before we can approve Facebook.”

Do these practices seem radical or realistic? Do you think IT practices of the last 15 years are still adequate to keep up with and

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