CIOs participating in a recent workshop agreed that rather than resisting IT consumerisation - the gradual overlapping of personal and corporate computing environments - companies should now ‘accept the inevitable’ and start to plan how their IT operations and businesses can benefit from the new trend.IT leaders participating in the workshop predicted that consumerisation could lead to dramatic cost savings and stressed that IT chiefs should be planning now how they will be adopting consumer technologies within the enterprise.

Talking to Verbatim, one CIO participating in the workshop said: “The consumerisation of IT will make all of us think differently. It’s a mind shift that we must be ready for. It’s now time for large businesses to start putting the strategies and implementation roadmaps for adoption in place. We must start thinking in practical terms about how the boundaries between the corporate and consumer IT worlds are blurring and how we can all benefit.”

Participants reported that within many organisations, the push towards consumer IT was coming from employees - and the need to attract and retain the best people. CIOs report that very often, graduates are attracted to companies that allow and encourage the use of Web 2.0 technologies - and are turned off by businesses that take a more heavy-handed, locked-down approach.

The Forum’s CIOs also predict that many IT departments will struggle to convince the boardroom to adopt consumer technologies. They believe that relationship managers from non-technical backgrounds will play an increasingly important role in explaining IT consumerisation to the business.

CIOs also put mobility, social and demographic change and green computing, at the top of their business agendas for 2008.