We saw it with the rise of PCs, the Internet, mobile computing devices, and now Web 2.0/social computing — the biggest and most disruptive forces come from outside the enterprise.

Ben Worthen, writing in the Wall Street Journal’s business technology blog, cites a new study from Yankee Group, which confirmed that 86% of employees say that they “use at least one consumer-oriented tech tool that isn’t supported by the IT department – things like instant messaging, USB drives, and iPhones – in the workplace, with the average employee using four.”

As Worthen observes, this is occurring in spite of the best efforts by IT groups to keep these tools out of the office.

Consumer technology outpaces enterprise computing because it is unencumbered by issues such as security and compliance, Yankee’s Josh Holbrook is quoted as saying. (I would add high availability to that list as well.) Plus, IT departments simply don’t have time to be innovative — they’re too busy in maintenance mode.

It’s interesting, because as noted at the beginning of this post, these are the same dynamics that were at play when employees first starting bringing in PCs to their offices in the 1980s, when IT departments were busy managing their mainframes. PCs — as are current Web 2.0 approaches — were fast, light, simple productivity workarounds. What would have taken years of endless meetings, strategy sessions, budget proposals, and development projects to get a certain application off the ground could be rectified in a few days (if not hours) with a PC and a packaged app.

This is not to knock IT folks — actually, they were among the first to start bringing in PCs, and currently among the first to be adopting wikis, mashups, and other Enterprise 2.0 approaches to help in their work. They, too, know they often have to work outside the bureaucracy to get things done.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.