Consumerization in the IT Service Ecosystem

Most of the available literature on IT consumerization focuses on current practices--from operational aspects of BYOD to its disruptive effects--but does little to illuminate the dynamics behind the trend's emergence. Exploring the driving forces behind consumerization is essential if IT organizations are to both make sense of the current dynamics of transformation and disruption and formulate effective strategies in response. This article is one of the first attempts to explain these dynamics as part of a logical progression, from the Web's invention in 1989 to its evolution into machine-to-machine communication through Web services to SOA's role as an application discipline in virtualized cloud infrastructure context--all of which brings us to today's BYOD and BYOA.