posted by Matt McAdams on August 25, 2010 10:38 AM

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article about businesses adopting Apple’s iPads. The article said that business users seeking increased productivity are spurring IT departments to support the new devices. This isn’t new, the article points out, and cites an analyst from Forrester Research named Ted Schadler:

Companies have often imposed policies against consumer-oriented technologies—ranging from thumb drives to Web-based email accounts—because of worries that include keeping corporate data secure and other impact on internal computing systems. But many employees defied rules and used these tools anyway, partly out of a belief they improved productivity, said Mr. Schadler. In many cases, IT departments eventually relented and relaxed their rules.

What a great explanation for what’s happening with cloud computing, or at least the subset of cloud services that are aimed at business users. Business users discovered the productivity gains of wikis, which led to a new generation of enterprise collaboration software purchased by IT. Business users discovered social networking, which has created “enterprise social networking,” again purchased and supported by IT. On the application development side, TrackVia is most often discovered by business users who want to quickly stand up web-based apps.  IT departments are forced to take a look at TrackVia, and (thankfully for us) come around to championing it.

It’s nice to know this process has happened before, and resulted in the productivity-enhancing products achieving ubiquity. First thumb drives; next, cloud app platforms!