Kyle Harrison
concept

Consumerization of the Enterprise

Consumerization of the Enterprise

The thesis that well-designed consumer software has reset workers’ expectations, so power shifts away from executive buyers toward individual end users who refuse to tolerate clunky enterprise tools. In Product Led Growth: The End User Era this is “the demand-side engine” of PLG — “when in doubt, ask if you would tolerate it in a consumer app” — and the same trend goes by a negative name, “Shadow IT,” when IT departments resent it. The book dates design becoming critical to software success to 2011–2012, “when the consumerization of the enterprise was all the rage,” and frames viral, network-effect products like Calendly as really “targeting consumers inside an enterprise.” It also records the skeptic’s view: Andrew Reed of Sequoia calls it “largely a failed promise to date… a really hard problem to solve.”

The same idea appears in two other places Kyle reads. In The Kill Chain, Christian Brose names consumerization of the enterprise as a structural problem for national defense: the commercial sector has outpaced government on software, autonomy, computer vision, and networking, yet the military’s procurement model can’t access it — Kyle repeatedly notes “consumerization of the enterprise” in the margins and flags a hunt for whoever first coined “consumerization of IT.” In Todd McKinnon — Creating and Defining a New Market Category, the cloud-stack migration (apps → collaboration → infrastructure) is tied to the Subscription Economy and the same consumerization trend.

Where this appears

  • The Kill Chain — the commercial sector outpaces military procurement on software/autonomy; Kyle’s recurring margin note on the defense-procurement gap.
  • Product Led Growth: The End User Era — the demand-side engine of PLG; power shifting to individual users, also called Shadow IT.
  • Todd McKinnon — Creating and Defining a New Market Category — the cloud-stack thesis connects to the Subscription Economy and consumerization.

Quick Capture links — June 29th, 2021

Reading-list links from Kyle’s June 29th, 2021 Roam daily-note “Quick Capture” log.

A quote Kyle had been looking for (April 2020)

  • Found an old quote I had been looking for about the Consumerization of the Enterprise
    • **“The consumerization of the enterprise is largely a failed promise to date, and it’s certainly not for a lack of effort. It’s just a really hard problem to solve.” **Andrew Reed at Sequoia // Source as of Aug. 5th 2019

Referenced in