Selling Consumer IT to Enterprises

Twenty years ago today Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and told Gorby to "tear it down." While we in IT never did anything quite so literal we've certainly torn down plenty of walls. No longer restricted to the boundaries of the enterprise, we use our company networks to interact with all types of external constituents including big suppliers, small vendors, marketing partners, investors and employees from newly acquired firms.

It wasn't so long ago workers asked why their intranets couldn't be as good as Amazon.com or why booking an entire trip on Expedia was easier than reserving our local board room. IT stepped up, and today many intranets imiate the simplicity of JetBlue.com.

Now IT is faced with yet another hurdle -- what to do with all that pesty consumer technology we employees bring to work. And it's the same argument we used in the last decade. We want to use all our "tools of the trade" from mobile video to PDAs, home office Wi-Fi, photo blogs, communities, SMS, MMS, consumer wireless email and whatever else comes along that we find useful.

If you sell consumer technology, telling your IT prospects to suck it up and support it, probably won't win you any new friends. Consumer IT poses new risks, and if something is important, then IT will eventually step up, own it, and manage it. If you want to accelerate the process (versus slowing it down) my friends in IT have some advice:

Acknowledge that consumer IT poses new risks. Give your prospects guidelines and advice for conducting a risk analysis that objectively balances the risks and rewards of the type of consumer technology you're suggesting they adopt.

Urge prospects to re-evaluate security policies and practices. "Just say no" hasn't exactly worked in the past - and older models such as the "enterprise fortress" are also becoming obsolete.

Gently ask your prospects if their management and accounting models are guilty of inflating the costs of owning and supporting consumer technology. Many IT managers base  cost-of-ownership on each separate device. A more holistic view could yield a much better answer. 

Advise your customers to approve consumer-grade products or services for a specific use while they are evaluating them.  Let them know you're on their side, and you're there to help them contain new consumer IT until they're re ready to be more formal in their support policy.