A partially-formed thought this morning... it occurs to me that "IT Consumerization" and Supply Chain Management have similar, interleaved concerns... in particular, that of quality.
I had the unfortunate experience yet again this weekend of dealing with deployment and roll-back (at home) of consumer-grade electronics... I found the entire experience irritating, as usually... Saturday I deployed a new wifi router at home in hopes of realizing better throughput... unfortunately, being consumer-grade equipment, while the setup and deployment was easy, we started having problems within a few minutes... specifically, the wifi had several issues, ranging from the "auto" choice of channels always picking the busiest channel (in 2.4GHz)... the wifi dropping outright (or, at least, not allowing connections)... and the DHCP issuing addresses then refusing to allow that address to continue being used... in all of these cases, the only "solution" was to physically reboot the router...
So, I called the "24x7" support line... which read me a message, waited 30 seconds, and then said "we're sorry, no agents are currently available, please call another time" and unceremoniously hung up on me... so, by "24x7" they apparently meant...? Who knows...
Now consider the IT consumerization movement... essentially, consumer-grade IT is flooding into the enterprise... which I have to believe is greatly increasing support costs and reducing productivity... the leading-edge example of this problem is through BYOD, which is increasing support costs in a few ways, while force-feeding the enterprise with consumer-grade electronics... I need only think of my Droid4, which has already been replaced once, and which is probably going to need to be replaced again, to see a ready example of how junky some of these solutions are... and don't even get me started on software and app stores these days...
At the end of the day, the common thread here is really about quality. IT consumerization is essentially about moving to mass-produced, consumer-grade products that are cheaper per-item, but come with far lower quality assurance standards. Interestingly, when we look at the current concerns around supply chain management (SCM), we see a similar issue of managing concern, though sometimes in different ways.
In part, SCM should be concerned about IT consumerization and the resulting negative impact on overall quality. However, at the intersection between these two points, we also see traditional SCM concerns - like black-topped chips - becoming even more difficult to manage given even lower quality control capabilities or expectations. Then add in that IT consumerization is pushing a vastly higher volume, which means it will be inevitable that hardware and software backdoors will almost certainly leak into the supply. Controlling for these quality concerns, as well as being able to realistically manage the associated risk factors, quickly becomes untenable. On the flip side, the costs associated with controlling sources on various electronics will be extremely steep, which further perpetuates the IT consumerization movement.
Overall, I think we're at an interesting and dangerous point in the digital revolution... IT consumerization has made advanced consumer electronics affordable and accessible, but at what cost? We know that the Android platform is notoriously insecure (at least in its default state)... Apple's iOS is suspected of being similarly insecure, even if to a lesser degree... where will the line be drawn with consumerization of IT, and will we ever be able to truly measure the potential impact on the business?
We definitely have seen consumerization work out ok for businesses... one need only think of the switch to consumer-grade hard drives or the example of Google's server architecture for a couple ready examples... however, those were decisions that were premeditated and calculated... today, we have no such luxury as IT consumerization accelerates on the back of BYOD successes (and failures)...
Interesting times indeed.
