How to Manage the Consumer IT Invasion

There are several steps CIOs can take to manage consumer technologies as they make their way into the enterprise:

• Find out what's happening. By determining which consumer technologies are popular with employees and why they want to use them, IT leaders can figure out the best ways to adapt them internally. Some technologies that have taken off on the consumer side already have offshoots better suited for enterprise use. For example, Google Desktop 3 for Enterprise, currently in beta, allows administrators to disable features they don't want employees to use. X1 Technologies, which has partnered with Yahoo, offers a competing enterprise search tool.

• Identify and mitigate risks. If employees need a particular technology to do their work, companies might need to shore up their network security or add bandwidth to support it. If a company allows the use of Skype, for example, it will want to block unsolicited incoming connections to Skype clients to discourage malicious activity.

• Govern usage. If you're going to ban an application, set up controls to prevent it from slipping in. Among the options: identity management systems, network access controls and intrusion prevention. "Rather than trying to create a secure perimeter and keep the consumer technology out, you should assume a hostile environment and drive security deeply and broadly into everything you do," says Gartner analyst David Smith.

If you're open to experimentation, make sure users know how far they can go. "You don't want to lose control with what's happening on your network," says Mintz Levin's Pretorius. "But at the same time you don't want to stifle creativity and innovation. Balancing the concerns and benefits related to consumer technologies is a constant battle, but I see it as a major part of my job going forward."

SIDEBAR: Enterprise Software Gets a Facelift

Consumer IT provides the model for new business applications

Enterprise software, look out. The hard-to-install, hard-to-use software of the past is quickly becoming a dinosaur. "The way that consumers use software is bleeding into the enterprise," says Paul Holland, general partner at Foundation Capital, a venture capital company. That means that more companies will be choosing on-demand software akin to Salesforce.com for nonstrategic tasks. It also means that users will expect business applications to be as easy as the ones they use at home.

"In the past, enterprise software was hard to use and people got discouraged," Holland says. "Users are driving the trend - they are the new heroes of the organization."

Just ask Roger Hoffman, director of technical service management at car research site Edmunds.com. Employees at Edmunds.com have been using an on-demand application called Service-now since February to log incidents, changes or problems with the production environment. Service-now was inspired by business-to-consumer software such as home banking applications, Google and Amazon.com. Hoffman says he is pleased so far and that users are happy with the easy-to-use interface.

Hoffman adds that users are increasingly looking for simple applications and attractive interfaces that mimic the software they use at home. Software vendors are taking note, following the lead of such vendors as Rearden Commerce, which enables customers to order business services online. The trend is even drifting into supply chain applications. The start-up Ketera Technologies offers an on-demand procurement application that promises companies it will "consumerize" purchasing and make ordering supplies as easy as ordering something from Amazon.com.