9. Consumer Technology is beating Enterprise IT, and soundly. If your “in-house” IT can’t compete with a consumer-grade provider available “on the web” you need to catch up and compete or concede the function.

John’s point is relevant, in my experience, when looking at collaboration tools in the enterprise IT space. Providing access to appropriate collaboration tools is something that most companies fail at miserably. Sure, there are companies out there (typically product and marketing) that have very formal workflow and collaboration tools. But the majority of companies that don’t require highly specialized software, consumer technology is a decade ahead of the enterprise collaboration tools. You can recognize the problem when your employees use AIM and spend their time on Facebook and Gmail.

The coming round of consumer technology is going to change the way that people work. If you look at the features of Google Wave, which include file sharing/workflow/collaboration, you can see how it will be leveraged in the workspace. I am not predicting a whole-sale shift to Google for the enterprise, Enterprise IT moves at a snail’s speed. However, I agree that enterprise IT managers should concede the function, with increased competitiveness in mind, to those service providers who do it best.