How is a smartphone like a lamp?

It’s well established that people increasingly want to use their personal devices for work. It’s the primary force driving this Consumerization of IT trend everyone is talking about. The impact of this trend on everything from back-end infrastructure to employee work habits is definitely huge, but also not fully understood. So I thought it would [...]

The Effects of Consumerization on the CIO

The enterprise workplace environment is being reshaped as the boundaries between corporate and personal lives blur through the collision of overlapping forces.   For CIOs, the entrance of rogue consumer technologies means that they are no longer in complete control of the organization’s IT environment.  CIOs need to balance the opportunities behind adoption of consumer [...]

Consumerization: Getting to the High-Order Bit

In my role at Avanade, I’m very fortunate to be able to visit with organizations around the globe helping them formulate and implement workplace technology solutions.  Whether in Stockholm or Singapore, Sydney or Seattle you can’t have a conversation about enterprise IT strategy without a long discussion on the role of ‘consumerization’ in the workplace. [...]

Convergence at 36,000 Feet

Hi, I’m Burley Kawasaki from Avanade!  I’m typing up this blog post flying at 36,000 feet on my way back from a busy trip to Europe.  I spent the week visiting some of our European offices, with one of the main goals being listening to the technology trends and innovations that our regional teams are [...]

And the BYOD Debate Rages On…

The issue at hand “Should employees be allowed to use their own device for work?”  Serving as the central question for a Wall Street Journal article published this morning, contributors weighed in on both sides of the debate surrounding the consumerization of IT.  It is undeniable that this is an issue which IT departments will [...]

Demise of the Graphical User Interface (GUI)

PowerShell – The Retro User Interface (RUI) for Systems Management in the Elastic Datacenter I began my IT career in the 1980’s before the advent of Windows (or Macintosh) and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). I was proficient with MS-DOS and Netware as well as VMS DCL and UNIX Shell command line interfaces but always found [...]

It’s a Cloudy World

In IT, we often do a terrible job explaining the simplest things. Take the concept of Cloud Computing. To most people not in IT, they can’t even begin to understand what it is. In fact, it’s downright cloudy! For my inaugural blog, I thought I would spend some time helping to clear the skies and [...]