Consumerisation is one of the coming trends in IT and, as in so many cases, it has become an ugly word that is designed to cover all manner of uses and abuses.
At heart, it concerns the pressure on IT hardware and software providers to develop and market products to businesses that will give employees similar levels of user experience to those they enjoy as consumers in their own homes.
The argument goes that people who use technology at home are going to be unwilling to put up with some of the unfriendly IT that is all too common in most businesses. This is especially true of the new generation coming out of school and college that have become accustomed to things such as social networking, for example.  

Push for teleworking
At the same time, the growing popularity of teleworking among employers and employees is helping to accelerate a trend where employees will be able to use their home computers for work as well as play.
Virtualisation is helping to make this process easier to achieve because it should enable companies to pipe desktop images to remote employees as and when they are required in a hardware-agnostic manner.
As a bit of a cynic, part of me wonders whether one of the great benefits as far as employers are concerned is that consumerisation allows them to pass on the costs of IT procurement to their employees.
Say a company employs 40 people that use computers and it manages to make nearly all of them remote workers. At any given time, there are unlikely to be more than 10 people in the office, so the company is able to throw out 40 PCs and replace them with 10 thin clients. Meanwhile, the 40 employees all use their home PCs to work for the company.
The good news for workers is that they can use a PC or laptop they like rather than one foisted on them, but there is more wear and tear on the systems they are paying for themselves and they also pay for the heat and light if they are working at home.
In addition, if the employee has a warranty contract with the hardware supplier, the employer might not even need to provide any dedicated IT hardware support.

Consumerism at work
There is another nuance of the word “consumerisation” which is that in applying consumerist principles to the workplace, employees and employers are changing the nature of their relationship to something closer to that between a service provider and a customer. Only in this case, it applies both ways. The employer provides the service to the employee in terms of access to its IT systems to get the job done and in turn, the worker provides his or her services back to the employer.
And the advantages of this are? Employees escape the hassle associated with travel into the office and get the benefit of more flexible working. Employers get lower costs in terms of infrastructure, support and office space, in addition to more flexible employee working patterns. The next questions is: where do channel partners fit into this equation? The answer is probably “anywhere and everywhere”, wherever they can make some money out of it.