Employees will drive IT adoption

Saddled with years of investment into IT, maintaining the same and now making the ‘cob-web’ of IT effectively work - CIOs of today have a humongous task. And, when each employee is seen as a cost-center, the proposition of ‘what’s in it for the employee’ becomes the focus while deliberating on next investments. ‘Employee’ will become the center of focus for IT purchase. And, no doubt, industry will soon be abuzz with ‘end-user’ adoption.
Google, Salesforce.com, Citrix to name a few are possibly aiming at this market – the oversold market - where ‘simplicity’ is the norm. The market will soon revolve around what the employees prefer. Are they bothered about servers? Storage? No, not at all. They are only bothered about finishing their work fast and leveraging applications that will enable them to efficiently undertake their work. Google launched an operating system centered around the web as the company saw an increasing number of people relying on the web to carry out their work. Salesforce famous for simplifying ERP and hosting the same on the web is another example. Citrix seems to be simplifying ‘virtualization’ by targeting employees with an effective desktop virtualization solution. All these companies are targeting employees/users in an enterprise.
As more and more employees pull out convenient applications from the web or the ‘cloud,’ there is no doubt that the market will revolve around powering these applications. Remember, how we use electricity for various purposes. Be it powering the refrigerator, geyser or microwave – all it takes is a switch. Do we know where electricity is stored? Now imagine every employee as an equipment – refrigerator, geyser etc. IT should be able to power these equipments, i.e, employees. Like the equipments that decide the amount of power to be consumed for a specific purpose, employees will decide the type of technology they will use.