What is "consumerization"

n. The process of consumerize.

Consumerization is the reorientation of product and service designs to focus on (and market to) the end user as an individual consumer, in contrast with an earlier era of only organization-oriented offerings (designed solely for business-to-business or business-to-government sales). The emergence of the individual consumer as the primary driver of product and service design is most commonly associated with the IT industry, as large business and government organizations dominated the early decades of computer usage and development. Thus the microcomputer revolution, in which electronic computing moved from exclusively enterprise and government use to include personal computing, is a cardinal example of consumerization. But many technology-based products, such as calculators and mobile phones, have also had their origins in business markets, and only over time did they become dominated by high-volume consumer usage, as these products commoditized and prices fell. An example of enterprise software that became consumer software is optical character recognition software, which originated with banks and postal systems (to automate cheque clearing and mail sorting) but eventually became personal productivity software.

In a different sense, Consumerization of IT is used to describe the proliferation of IT at the workplace, which originates in the consumer market, to be used for professional purposes. It has been postulated as one of the most important IT trends and gained much attention among practitioners Looking at empirical statistics, the development particularly includes the use of laptops, netbooks, tablets, and smartphones on the hardware side, and social media, web conferencing, and cloud storage on the software side.