The Consumerization of Enterprise Tech. The Enterprising of Consumer Tech.

SAP has hired Julie Roehm as an SVP of Marketing. I don’t know the lady and think it is unfair that the stories about her border on tabloid reporting. But it is an interesting move for SAP to hire someone with a background in consumer advertising at Chrysler, Ford and Walmart.

At IBM’s Lotusphere this morning, Paul Gillin reports “Lotus social business platform, which borrows liberally from Facebook, Hootsuite and paper.li. The user interface is a Facebook/Google+-like internal social network”

It’s good to see consumerization finally impact the enterprise world. 

Even as IBM’s Sam Palmisano retires, he talks with pride about having spun off the “consumery” PC business. A couple of years ago, at an SAP event I wrote about consumer tech being characterized as “toys and buzzwords”

Better late than never. It’s only taken a decade. As I wrote in The New Polymath

Of course, it was not just Apple. Microsoft introduced the Xbox in 2001; HP announced more of a focus on entertainment with its Media Center PC in 2002; Skype arrived in 2003 and would change calling habits for millions around the world; the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft disrupted our lives in 2004; and in 2005, with  the Sony Rootkit issue, consumers started to hear about intellectual property issues previously limited to corporate corridors. Since 2005,
Google’s growing Web and mobile presence has introduced consumers to analytical power that big companies paid bucketloads of money for. The Apple iPhone—considered one of the most successful product launches ever—and all kinds of GPS, gaming, entertainment, and other gadgets have only accelerated the consumerization trend. The Wii
reshaped our expectations of computer interfaces; the Kindle, our expectations of books. Electronic House magazine has celebrated houses with all kinds of home theaters and elaborate security systems. eBay has built a cottage industry of individuals doing business from home. JetBlue has moved call reservations to agents working from home. SOHO is no longer just a Manhattan neighborhood but a growing revenue category for technology companies as the acronym for small
office, home office.

The problem is the consumerization trend has accelerated. Consumers are getting used to music in the cloud, Siri voice interfaces, Kinect gestural interfaces while enterprises are still struggling with cloud security, and still only improving keyboard and mouse interfaces.

And even more dramatically, my research for my next book showed “enterprising of consumer tech”. Apple’s Retail, Google’s Green initiatives, Facebook’s data centers, eBay’s (Paypal) financial processing, Amazon’s logistics are absolutely top-notch. Tim Cook of Apple, Tony Prophet of HP, Jim Miller of Google and several other consumer tech executives are  operational/supply chain geniuses.

The ways things are going, enterprise tech will not just need to learn about consumerization, but also enterprising, from consumer tech.