Users are bringing consumer technology into companies at an ever increasing rate. And while rules and policies can slow down adoption or drive use of these technologies underground, nothing is going to stop it. I’ve argued for a while now that corporate IT needs to develop a strategy that embraces (or at the very least accounts for) consumer technology and the way people use it. One of the most frustrating counterarguments is that no one should use non-supported technology because it is IT’s job to provide technology.

Here’s my reply to that tautology: The consumer technology universe has evolved to the point where it is a fully functioning alternative IT department. Every characteristic you apply to your IT department applies to the consumer IT department. CIOs need to define what role this new IT department will play in their companies and figure out how to balance it with the official one. Otherwise corporate IT will fall further out of touch with users, who will respond by turning to this other IT department for more and more of their technology needs.

There is a tendency for CIOs to either pretend this other IT department doesn’t exist in their company or to try to block it. But the consumer IT department isn’t something that rogue employees in your company build. It’s the Internet itself, devices sold in every Best Buy, web-based applications developed by 22 year old whiz kids, and it's organized by Google. It’s a collective enterprise; everyone has access to this IT department. It exists everywhere so it is impossible to keep out. And it has no head so it is impossible to kill.

It is a fundamentally different model, which makes it hard for people who think about IT in the traditional sense to understand. Marty Anderson, a professor at the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, has developed a helpful framework for thinking about traditional and non-traditional organizational models. He calls one a command architecture and the other an emergent architecture. A command architecture is a highly structured environment where an individual or a small group controls all the nodes in a network and their relationship to one another. In an emergent architecture there is no single authority and little predetermined hierarchy; nodes join on their own and develop their own relationships. It’s the difference between a corporate network and the Internet.

IT isn’t the only function in a company where these two models coexist. For example, the same dynamic has played out in HR for as long as there have been companies. People have titles and reporting relationships that give their work a formal structure, but at the same time every company has an informal structure determined by expertise, interpersonal relationships, work ethic, overall effectiveness, and so on. Companies suffer when HR is out of line with the informal architecture -- people leave companies when the formal architecture elevates someone at the bottom of the informal architecture to a position of authority, and the top performers who most often occupy the top spots in the informal architecture leave when they aren’t recognized by the formal one. Good HR departments know where employees stand in both the formal and informal architecture and successfully balance the two.

Balance is the key. Command and emergent architectures aren’t inherently good or bad, nor are they inherently in conflict. Right now, I think that corporate IT is threatened by consumer IT. Yes, it will change the power relationship between the IT department and users, but beyond that it this isn’t a zero-sum game. Just like in the HR example above, the best organizations will find the right mix of both. The result will be an atmosphere that encourages innovative employees to find better ways to work, while safeguarding information that needs to be protected. But the point I’d like to stress is that they can only coexist if the people operating the command architecture acknowledge and respond to the emergent architecture.

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