Toward Everyone's IT: A Study of Consumerization at GlobalBankCorp

Abstract

The adoption and use of consumer information technology (IT) solutions in the enterprise is on the rise. The phenomenon, often referred to as consumerization, has a significant potential to reshape relationships to IT across different organizational contexts and levels. Yet, scholarly research examining topics related to consumerization, such as the use of mobile email devices by the workforce, so far has been rather mute on the deeper organizational shifts that are occurring as a result of consumerization. Our study of consumerization at GlobalBankCorp finds that business practitioners’ use of IT in organizational context is undergoing a significant change. To deepen our understanding of this change we introduce the concept of “everyone’s IT.” Developed through grounded theorizing, the concept synthesizes three practices enacted by business practitioners in their interactions with IT, namely (1) drawing upon unbounded consumer IT resources; (2) developing a consumer IT mindset; and (3) leveraging consumer IT’s potential for value creation. We define and elaborate the three practices by zooming in onto two particular case contexts within GlobalBankCorp. In combination, the two contexts explain the observed shift and suggest that this shift presents significant challenges to the well established assumptions about the role and boundaries of the IT function in organizations. We expect that our work will contribute to broadening the scholarly conversation about consumerization from that focused solely on the adoption and use of consumer IT by employees to a more comprehensive view capturing how organizations embrace consumerization to develop new products and services, re-define their business model, and re-think their relationship to IT.