Consumerization is the reorientation of product and service designs to focus on (and
market
Market is a term used to describe concepts such as:
*Market (economics), system in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand
*Market economy
*Marketplace, a physical marketplace or public market
Geography
*Märket, an ...
to) the
end user as an individual
consumer
A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or uses purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. ...
, in contrast with an earlier era of only
organization
An organization or organisation (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English; American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize (-isation, -ization), see spelling differences), is an legal entity, entity—such as ...
-oriented offerings (designed solely for
business-to-business or
business-to-government
Business-to-government (B2G),Market Business NewsWhat is B2G or business-to-government? Definition and examples accessed 31 August 2020 also known as business-to-administration (B2A), refers to trade between the business sector as a supplier and a ...
sales). Technologies whose first
commercialization
Commercialization or commercialisation is the process of introducing a new product or production method into commerce—making it available on the market. The term often connotes especially entry into the mass market (as opposed to entry into ...
was at the inter-organization level thus have potential for later consumerization. The emergence of the individual consumer as the primary driver of product and service design is most commonly associated with the
IT industry, as large business and government organizations dominated the early decades of
computer usage and development. Thus the
microcomputer revolution
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where ...
, in which electronic
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
moved from exclusively enterprise and government use to include
personal computing
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or techn ...
, is a cardinal example of consumerization. But many technology-based products, such as
calculators and
mobile phone
A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whi ...
s, have also had their origins in business markets, and only over time did they become dominated by high-volume consumer usage, as these products
commoditized and prices fell. An example of enterprise
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
that became consumer software is
optical character recognition software, which originated with banks and postal systems (to automate
cheque clearing
Cheque clearing (or check clearing in American English) or bank clearance is the process of moving cash (or its equivalent) from the bank on which a cheque is drawn to the bank in which it was deposited, usually accompanied by the movement of the c ...
and
mail sorting
Mail sorting refers to the methods by which postal systems determine how and where to route mail for delivery. Once accomplished by hand, mail sorting is now largely automated through the aid of specialized machines. The first widely adopted m ...
) but eventually became
personal productivity software.
In a different sense, consumerization of IT is the proliferation of personally owned IT at the workplace (in addition to, or even instead of, company-owned IT), which originates in the consumer market, to be used for professional purposes. This
bring your own device trend has significantly changed corporate IT policies, as employees now often use their own
laptops
A laptop, laptop computer, or notebook computer is a small, portable personal computer (PC) with a screen and alphanumeric keyboard. Laptops typically have a clam shell form factor with the screen mounted on the inside of the upper li ...
,
netbooks,
tablets, and
smartphones on the
hardware side, and
social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
,
web conferencing
Web conferencing is used as an umbrella term for various types of online conferencing and collaborative services including webinars (web seminars), webcasts, and web meetings. Sometimes it may be used also in the more narrow sense of the peer-l ...
,
cloud storage, and
software as a service
Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
SaaS is con ...
on the
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
side.
Origins
Consumerization has existed for many decades, as, for example, the consumerization of
refrigeration
The term refrigeration refers to the process of removing heat from an enclosed space or substance for the purpose of lowering the temperature.International Dictionary of Refrigeration, http://dictionary.iifiir.org/search.phpASHRAE Terminology, ht ...
occurred in the 1910s through 1950s. The consumerization of IT is believed to have been first regularly called by that term by Douglas Neal and John Taylor of the
Leading Edge Forum in 2001; the first known published paper on this topic was published by the LEF in June 2004. The term is now used widely throughout the IT industry, and is the topic of numerous conferences and articles. One of the first articles was special insert in "The Economist" magazine on October 8, 2011. Later, ''Consumerization of IT'' has been used ambiguously. In an effort to structure the amorphous nature of the term, researchers suggested to take three distinct perspectives: an individual, organizational and market perspective.
The technology behind the consumerization of computing can be said to have begun with the development of eight-bit, general-purpose
microprocessors
A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...
in the early 1970s and eventually the
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thus, the
microcomputer revolution
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where ...
, in which electronic
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
moved from exclusively enterprise and government use to include
personal computing
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or techn ...
, is the cardinal example of consumerization. However, it is significant that the great success of the
IBM PC in the first half of the 1980s was driven primarily by business markets. Business preeminence continued during the late 1980s and early 1990s with the rise of the
Microsoft Windows PC platform. Meanwhile, other technology-based products, such as
calculators,
fax
Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer o ...
machines, and
mobile phones, also had their origins in business markets, and only over time did they become dominated by high-volume consumer usage, as these products commoditized and prices fell.
It was the growth of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s that began to reverse this pattern. In particular the rise of free, advertising-based services such as
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...
and
search from companies such as
Hotmail
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
and
Yahoo
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...
began to establish the idea that consumer IT offerings based on a simple Internet
browser were often viable alternatives to traditional business computing approaches. Meanwhile, it is argued that consumerization of IT embodies more than consumer IT diffusion, but a chance for considerable productivity gains. It "reflects how enterprises will be affected by, and can take advantage of, new technologies and models that originate and develop in the consumer space, rather than in the enterprise IT sector".
Business implications
The primary impact of consumerization is that it is forcing businesses, especially large enterprises, to rethink the way they procure and manage IT equipment and services. Historically, central IT organizations controlled the great majority of IT usage within their firms, choosing or at least approving of the systems and services that employees used. Consumerization enables alternative approaches. Today, employees and departments are becoming increasingly self-sufficient in meeting their IT needs. Products have become easier to use, and
cloud-based
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mult ...
,
software-as-a-service offerings are addressing an ever-widening range of business needs in areas such as
video-conferencing,
digital imaging
Digital imaging or digital image acquisition is the creation of a digital representation of the visual characteristics of an object, such as a physical scene or the interior structure of an object. The term is often assumed to imply or include t ...
, business
collaboration,
sales force support, systems
back-up
In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "wikt:back u ...
, and other areas.
Similarly, there is increasing interest in so-called
Bring Your Own Device strategies, where individual employees can choose and often own the computers and/or
smart phones
A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which ...
they use at work. The Apple
iPhone and
iPad
The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating ...
have been particularly important in this regard. Both products were designed for individual consumers, but their appeal in the workplace has been great. They have demonstrated that elements of choice, style and entertainment are now critical computer industry dimensions that businesses cannot ignore.
Equally important, large enterprises have become increasingly dependent upon consumerized services as search, mapping, and social media. The capabilities of firms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are now essential components of many firm's marketing strategies. One of the most important consumerization questions going forward is to what extent such advertising-based services will spread into major corporate applications such as
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...
,
Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study big data, large amounts of information.
CRM systems data collectio ...
(CRM), and
Intranets.
One of the more serious negative implications of consumerization is that security controls have been slower to be adopted in the consumer space. As a result, there is an increased risk to the information assets accessed through these less trustworthy consumerized devices. In a recent CSOOnline article by Joan Goodchild she reported a survey that found "when asked what are the greatest barriers to enabling employees to use personal devices at work, 83 percent of IT respondents cited "security concerns" This shortcoming may soon be remedied by the chip manufacturers with technologies such as
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
's "Trusted Execution Technology" and
ARM
In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...
's "Trust Zone"
[White Paper, "Building a Secure System using TrustZone® Technology", http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.prd29-genc-009492c/PRD29-GENC-009492C_trustzone_security_whitepaper.pdf, ARM, Accessed 27/02/2012]—these technologies being designed to increase the trustworthiness of both enterprise and consumer devices.
Technology implications
In addition to the mass market changes above, consumer markets are now changing large-scale computing as well. The giant
data centers that have been and are being built by firms such as Google,
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...
,
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...
and others are far larger and generally much more efficient than the data centers used by most large enterprises. For example, Google is said to support over 300 million
Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...
accounts, while executing more than 1 billion searches per day.
Supporting these consumer-driven volumes requires new levels of efficiency and scale, and this is transforming many traditional data center approaches and practices. Among the major changes are reliance on low cost, commodity
servers,
N+1 system redundancy, and largely unmanned data center operations. The associated software innovations are equally important in areas such as
algorithms,
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
, and
Big data. In this sense, consumerization seems likely to transform much of the overall computing stack, from individual devices to many of the most demanding large-scale challenges.
References
External links
* http://BringYourOwnIT.com Independent forum on Consumerization and
BYOD
{{Consumer behaviour
Information technology