Dateline: London

Yankee Group VP Camille Mendler’s excellent Anywhere Tour presentation on Generation Me and the consumerization of technology in the enterprise just concluded; she’d talked about the maturation of a self-possessed young workforce accustomed to getting what it wants and very much at ease with rev after rev of consumer electronics products.

We had launched into lively Q&A incited by her remarks when one baby boomer spoke up. “Isn’t this a repeat? Isn’t this like the way the PC came into the corporation from the edge followed by the local-area network? The last two major innovations in technology have both been forced on to the central IT organization against its will. How’s this different?”

Too true.

Corporate IT will once again be fighting the impression in the organization that they’re on the job to stop things they can’t control. The difference is that this battle is unfolding even faster than the last two, and on many more fronts inside the company. And the risks are bigger, given that every MP3 device is just an unauthorized hard drive. IT has to respond quickly and more nimbly.

Camille’s presentation drew from an upcoming Yankee Group report (clients: look for Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management shortly) on the pressures building on traditional IT teams from employees expecting to be able to use all their personal electronic toys at work and impatient with the imposition of limitations on support. I like the report’s ideas about how IT can best cope with the onslaught. How is your firm’s IT team coping with the explosion of smart phones, MP3 devices, cheap storage sticks, third-party e-mail retrieval, and all the other unapproved tools we depend on each day?