Do you use a smartphone at work? That’s an example of the consumerization of IT. Do you recruit employees or interact with customers through social media like Facebook? More consumerization of IT. How about invoicing and payment or procurement through cloud-based exchanges like Ariba? Same thing.

A Unisys study two years ago hinted at the consumerization of IT in business. An online poll of more than 500 enterprise information workers showed a majority prefer using their own PC or a hosted virtual desktop to do their work and to access information resources. Only a minority continues to subscribe to the traditional model of using a PC provided and managed by their company.

A more recent Unisys study in conjunction with IDC dubbed this trend Consumer-Powered IT, and already it is turning the traditional IT business model on its head. Unisys expects it will transform organizations over the next 3-5 years while bringing in a new wave of business productivity. Is Finance aware of and ready to capitalize on this new wave? more

If you believe the hype about VMworld 2011, the annual virtualization fest held by VMware, the leading distributed systems hypervisor company, you might think virtualization was poised to take over the world. OK, in some ways it is, at least the IT world anyway. CFOs should care because virtualization has the potential to save money and eliminate a lot they don’t like about conventional IT.

But VMworld wasn’t the only mega-event going on. Salesforce.com, the 900 lbs. gorilla in the SaaS industry, staged its annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco this same week. Dreamforce expects 45,000 attendees, better than doubling VMworld’s 20,000. Salesforce is using Dreamforce to rebrand itself as the social enterprise company on the basis of its cloud platform and how it leverages social, mobile, and open cloud technologies to change companies’ relationships with their customers. Dreamforce sponsors include the big consulting firms but few of the IT vendors.

Judging by the projected attendance at this year’s VMworld it clearly was one of the two places to be this final week of summer if you’re interested in IT. The list of corporate participants includes all the big names in technology—the ones not at Dreamforce–Cisco, EMC, HP, NetApp, CA, IBM, Intel, Symantec, and more; a veritable clash of titans. Here’s a sampling: more

The so-called recovery may be flaccid and the markets may be erratic, but one thing is certain: there is no recession when it comes to information and the need to store it and protect it. In a recent briefing IBM noted that storage demand is doubling every 18 months. Structured information—the kind contained in your databases, financial systems, ERP systems, and such—is growing 32% each year while unstructured data, which is everything else from email to documents to images, is growing at 63% annually.

IT analyst Greg Schulz makes exactly this point in his blog here. Check out his discussion of ways to address the inexorable growth of demand for storage.

At the same time leading storage vendors have been announcing new products that promise to streamline and simplify the storage challenges facing CFOs. Make no mistake, given the amount of spending directed at information storage and protection this should become a top fiduciary and compliance concern of every CFO. more

The IT systems you consider mission-critical almost certainly remain mission-critical today. But are there other systems that should be receiving similar attention and protection too?

A new study by Springboard Research sponsored by Intel may lead you to expand your idea of what constitutes mission-critical. The study found the idea of mission-critical computing is expanding from historical definitions to a far broader spectrum of workloads and applications.

What are your truly mission-critical systems? Certainly ERP and transaction processing systems remain mission-critical. Is CRM mission critical? How about procurement? Or HR? Or Finance itself? more

Few quibble with the value of ERP systems for midsize and large enterprises. The ability to monitor and manage a core business process as key information moves to the right places at the right time without cumbersome and error-prone re-inputting has proven to be a game changer. ERP is important enough that Gartner has dubbed it a Key Initiative and assembled a large amount of information on it.

The Achilles heel of ERP, however, is when a business process must continue beyond the boundaries of the organization. Then the tight integration and seamless data flow of ERP breaks down. And what important business process today is self-contained? In our networked, collaborative business environment seemingly every business process crosses the organization’s walls.

“The ERP system is traditionally set up to handle processes from an internal standpoint,” said Mickey North Rizza, research director at Gartner in the recently published CIO Market Pulse survey. But that’s not where business is now. So what’s the CFO to do? more