Consumerization of IT

Submission deadline: 1 February 2014
Publication: September/October 2014

This special issue of IT Professional will review trends, risk factors, and approaches that businesses must consider to capitalize on demographic and technological shifts in the information environment and avoid the pitfalls brought about by the blurring line between consumer and business technologies.

In today's enterprise, the consumerization of IT is being pushed by a younger, more mobile workforce comprising active users of new technologies and applications. Employees expect to be able to use their personal devices — and applications they are familiar with — at work, which relates to concepts of BYOX — Bring Your Own Device, Cloud, App, and Network. Instead of new technology flowing down from business to the consumer, as it did with the desktop computer, the flow has reversed and the consumer market often gets new technology before it enters (and is fully leveraged by) the enterprise.

This blending of personal and business technology is having a significant impact on corporate IT departments, which traditionally issue and control the technology that employees use to do their jobs. Consequently, IT departments must decide how to protect their networks and manage technology that they perhaps did not procure or provision.

We are looking for high-quality contributions from industry, government, business, and academia that address these trends, issues, and challenges. Topics of interest include:

• How organizations have successfully embraced the consumerization of IT
• Frameworks for governance and policy development
• Risk identification and mitigation, including regulatory issues and protection of IP
• Assessing impact on processes and legacy environments
• Changes to technology evaluation criteria
• Vendor strategies around consumerization issues
• Pros and cons of consumerization
• Cultural implications around adoption and buy in
• Impact on innovation, collaboration, and economic performance
• Applying consumer technology development approaches to internal development processes
• Understanding and modeling business users from a consumer perspective
• Security challenges

Submissions

We also welcome multimedia features (related videos, demos, audio clips, and so on). Feature articles should be no longer than 4,200 words (with tables and figures each counting as 300 words) and have no more than 20 references. Illustrations are welcome. For author guidelines, including sample articles see http://www.computer.org/portal/web/peerreviewmagazines/acitpro.

Submit your article at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/itpro-cs.

Questions?

For further information contact the Guest Editors:

• Seth Earley, seth@earley.com, Earley & Associates, Inc.
• Robert Harmon, harmonr@pdx.edu, Portland State University
• Maria R. Lee, maria.lee@mail.usc.edu.tw, Shih Chien University
• Sunil Mithas, smithas@umd.edu, University of Maryland