The greatest trends in IT today are Consumerization, the Cloud, and Customer Service. These are massive forces looming larger and larger.

Consumerization Consumerization has turned out to be a lot more than which mobile devices you choose to support.  It is leading to whether to build mobile apps for your custom applications and whether to virtualize your desktops.

Consumerization isn’t just users wanting new toys. The consumers’ computing world is often ahead of business computing. There’s cabling in the walls at home that’s been unused for years. My son’s home phone is his mobile. My daughter types as fast on her iPhone as I do on my laptop. My iPod is automatically backed up to the cloud. And we have apps that are not only easy to use, but fun! Users increasingly want access to all their apps and files anywhere, anytime, on any device. Remote access and support of multiple devices have merged. The desktop is just one more device, or maybe only a location. From there, it’s logical to consider putting everything on servers, including data, and supplying a common secure service to all the different devices. Once this is done, desktop virtualization is a natural step.

The Cloud Once you’re serving multiple devices over the Internet, where’s the best place to put your data center? With proximity no longer a factor, the key features become connectivity, reliability, business continuity, the skill set of the onsite staff, and price. On all of these, the cloud wins.

Only it’s not just moving your data center. It’s moving more and more apps out of your data center. Office 365 is pretty much defining SaaS as the default. Nonprofits can now get Exchange online for as low as $2 per user per month, with business continuity, upgrades and patches. Hard to beat that!

Customer Service The good news is that at least some of the jobs your department loses probably can be moved to customer service. We believe, that, on the average, in-house IT probably ranks about where the telecom and cable industries do on customer experience surveys. Hey, they’re better than the health insurance industry, but that’s about it. There’s lots of room for improvement.

The ITIL folks have been stressing the service essence of IT for some time, but consumerization is making the transition to customer service urgent. In the rest of the world, this is the Age of the Customer, and that is setting expectations. CGNET knows how much customer service matters. It’s what’s kept us going for 30 years. We take pride in serving organizations like yours and work a lot to keep them happy. Believe us, it works.