"participation mystique", now that is a nice turn of phrase. Thank you. I wasn't much impressed by the intellectual heft of IT consumerization.

where products and technologies start out in the hands of consumers before making their way into the enterprise, has recently accelerated to the point that it has gotten its own (somewhat unwieldy) buzzword: "IT consumerization." Pundits are still trying to sort out what, if anything, the new term really signifies, but for my own part I think there's a real trend at work here.

In this short article, I want to break down the phenomenon of IT consumerization, broadly defined as the general move of consumer-level products and technologies into the enterprise, into three constituent factors, with a view to following up on these themes in later interviews with people out in the trenches of enterprise IT. ...

Oddly enough, I remember the Lotus Notes Apocalypse, or the standards battle for corporate buyers over ASP in the trades. The key benefit, irrespective of API, being liberation of the "worker" from their ERP and HR hell to "self-service" scale efficiencies. And "knowledge management" was a twinkle in Tom Stewart's eye, the curse of analysts. How old is this guy?

[U]sers develop their sense of how networked apps (messaging, collaboration, and archival) should look and function through daily contact with the lively ecosystem of consumer-driven Web 2.0 applications. Next to something like Facebook or Google Maps, most corporate intranets have an almost Soviet-like air of decrepit futility, like they're someone's lame attempt to imitate for a captive audience what's available on the open market.[emphasis added]

In the future, work will be (personalized) fun for me and I. If we aren't allowed to tele-commute. Or rent an address from the company VPN. Our job discripts will have infinite numbers of avatar agents, multiplying geometrically the value added by my computing powah and market intelligence across the globe. Total. Information. Awareness. Like Twitter. Or the NSA, but bettah.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.