photo by esharkdesign.com
There are many articles on the web that predicted the convergence of consumer technologies and the enterprise, often referred to as consumerization of IT. This is a trend that was offered by Gartner as early as 2005 and as this blog post suggests, consumerization of IT was born when IBM PC was announced in 1981. Higher education, including student affairs, is faced with the reality of having to adapt to the new demands of technologically dominated world. This new reality are driven by 1) student population and younger workforce who grew up in the age of internet and with the expectation of open access to internet resources, 2) increasing budget cuts and external mandates leading to re-organizations and reliance on technology for automation, 3) more technology choices provided to the workforce via consumer technologies/services like social media, cloud and mobile computing 4) faster pace of changing technologies and adoption of these technologies by business units with or without IT involvement. The pace by which student affairs business units embrace technology, specifically consumer technologies, in my career, is comparable only to when I started working as a web developer for student affairs in 1996 when these same business units started realizing the value of the web. Below are some personal observations from the last couple of years as a technology service provider in central student affairs IT.
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