By Duncan McLeod

Corporate IT departments have a big challenge on their hands. Their users are bringing all sorts of newfangled devices like smartphones and tablets into the work environment and expecting them to interact seamlessly with their companies’ IT systems. Employees love these gadgets and they help them be more productive. But they fill chief information officers with dread.

Most CIOs crave order. They love IT systems that are locked down, manageable and secure. So, when their users come into the office with an ever-expanding array of smartphones and tablet computers, demanding that they have access to the corporate IT systems on their devices, the immediate reaction of the IT department is often to say: “Hell, no!”

Except banning these devices is difficult, because more often than not it’s the CEO or the financial director who wants access to company documents and e-mail on these devices that they’ve just bought at the local Incredible Connection store. IT departments find it easy to say “no” to ordinary users, but when the CEO is asking for line-of-business systems on his iPad, they feel compelled to come up with a plan.

The problem is, most IT departments are already stretched. If they’re not busy maintaining existing systems or locking down security threats, they’re working on big upgrades and new software projects. They often simply don’t have the resources to cope with the added burden of managing and securing a wide range of new devices that their users are bringing into the office.

IT departments might try to ban the use of these gadgets, but doing so could encourage risky behaviour — and ultimately put the brakes on innovation. How many millions of users worldwide, unhappy that their companies don’t support their particular devices, have simply rerouted their e-mail to consumer cloud-based services like Gmail or Windows Live Mail? And who can blame them? That iPad or MacBook Air is certainly sexier than the clunky, corporate-issue Windows workstation on their desks. And, heck, Gmail and other consumer Web services are probably more reliable and available, anyway.

This is a disruptive megatrend in the IT industry. The lines between corporate and personal information systems are blurring. And IT managers have yet to understand the vast implications — security and regulatory compliance are two big ones — as computing moves from inside the firewall and into the “cloud”. For many, the idea of loosening their tight control over their systems may be the toughest hurdle they will ever have to overcome.

Google CIO Ben Fried penned an interesting piece in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine in which he argued that CIOs need to understand that they “have to give up a certain amount of control”.

He said this is not necessarily a bad thing, because users become more self-supporting. “The reason they choose a particular technology is probably because they knew it or liked it or wanted to know it,” Fried wrote. “All of those things will lead to a better situation than if you just told them what they had to do.”

Another challenge of banning consumer technologies is that the smartest people will rebel. They’ll put up never-ending fights with the IT department. And if they don’t succeed, they’ll go and work for companies that don’t have restrictive policies. And those are the companies that will succeed in the longer term because they don’t have conservative cultures that put a dampener on technology innovation. It’s a bit like a media company restricting journalists’ access to social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. The IT department or CEO may think that makes sense to boost productivity, but without exposure to those systems, which are changing the media industry fundamentally, innovation withers at the vine.

CIOs need to know that consumerisation of IT is inevitable. Smart companies will recognise this and embrace it as an opportunity rather than a threat and find ways of dealing with the challenges it presents them.

A recent report by Forrester Research — commissioned by Microsoft — makes the bold statement that a “new wave of expansion, fuelled not by the experimentation of large enterprises, but by the power of people within those enterprises to provision their own technology” is now taking place.

“The IT status quo will collapse under these forces, and a new model will take its place,” Forrester predicts. “Today’s IT and business leaders should prepare by rethinking the role the IT department plays and how technology staff engages the business, shifting from controlling to teaching and guiding.”

It will require a fundamental cultural change in IT management, from one where the defining role has been tight control of company-supplied information systems to one where policies and procedures guide users who often spend their own money to acquire tools that they’ll happily use in the workplace.

The generation now entering the workforce will demand it. They’ve grown up using powerful IT systems that make many corporate systems look decrepit. They’ll gravitate to companies that embrace concepts such as social networking and cloud computing because that’s what they know and it’s what they expect.