I recently read an interesting article “John Sculley on Steve Jobs”, which as the name suggests was an interview transcript of John Sculley the former CEO of Apple. John Sculley talks about “The Steve Job’s Methodology” on how to build great products, he says Job’s always looked at things from the perspective of what the user experience is going to be. He didn’t believe is asking consumers what they want, but rather built beautiful products which people ended up wanting. Similar to what Henry Ford had said about consumer views on the car, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.
Over the last several years Steve Jobs and Apple have completely transformed the industry segment they entered be it the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad. The experience of the Apple products, the hardware, the software, the color (white!) the packaging everything is about user experience. The hype before an Apple product launch, the queues outside Apple stores are simply amazing examples of how consumer behavior is being driven.
How is this changing the “Enterprise” behavior? While its people who work in Enterprises the way an Enterprise looked at end user technology and how individuals in their capacity as consumers looked at it were different. I guess that’s why end user technologies like laptops or operating systems had enterprise range products and consumer range products. Enterprises used to determine what specific laptop or mobile product models could be used for corporate IT services.
Apple I think is changing this, consumerization of the Enterprise is happening. I was involved in an Information risk management framework transformation project for a service provider in Japan. While the Management, IT, Business and Security teams had their own requirements and expectations from the project, the end users hoped the project would enable use of the iPhone for business communication and email (Only one specific mobile device was allowed to be used for company email). Incidentally the transformation of the risk framework did allow iPhone type devices to be used by modifying the process and control framework.
Several organizations are now allowing or thinking of ways they can let the users choose the end user technologies to access IT services in a secure form. The advent of the iPad or the tablet phenomenon would only make it impossible for companies to stay away from this change. It’s not just Apple, but other companies and technologies are also driving this change. We now see interesting ads from “Enterprise” technology firms like RIM getting more consumer friendly (“Blackberry Boys”) or the younger generation doing special behavioral changes to get “their first android”.
Apple released the iPad on 3rd April 2010; it sold 1 million units by 3rd May 2010. Analysts predict close to 8 million iPad’s will sell in 2010. Rumors are that the iPad 2.0 would be released early year with a prediction of selling 6 million units a month! Now consider this in context that the iPad is available for sale in only select countries and other tablets are also making their mark. Mobile applications are expected to touch revenue’s of $35 billion by 2014, Gartner has predicted 10% drop in their PC sales predictions for 2011 mostly on account of the increased interest in tablets.
Hence I am of the opinion that consumerization of the enterprise is a foregone conclusion and organizations need to modify their risk management postures to allow for a range of “consumer” devices and applications (e.g. social networking) to be used within the enterprise.
“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” - H. G. Wells.
