I'm probably not the only person who's tired of seeing that Rahm Emmanuel quote about not wasting a good crisis, but the reason it's so often repeated is that it's true. A crisis like the current one is a good time to make tough changes that some parts of your organization will be resistant too, and if there's any part of a typical business that's change-resistant it is (ironically) the IT department.
Obviously, IT people deal with technology changes as part of their job description, but policy changes are another matter entirely, especially when said changes mean that the IT department will have to give up a little bit of control over its users. But such surrender is exactly what IT consumerization demands, and if you're serious about using "consumer"-class hardware and software to save big money in your SMB, then you may hgave to drag your IT department kicking and screaming behind you.
At the core of most of the IT consumerization-friendly policy changes that you'll have to make is the following basic principle: users should be free to use the tools that they're the most comfortable with and excited about, because those are the tools that will unleash their maximum productivity.
The IT consumerization trend may be driven by a number of technological and economic factors, but an important component of it is the social factor implied in the principle above. Namely, that all knowledge workers are now power users with some subset of currently available tools--a particular mobile phone, a certain version of a word processor, an operating system, etc.. This is in start contrast to the situation that pertained at the dawn of the IT department, when apocryphal "dumb user" stories (e.g., the secretary who mistook her mouse for a pedal) elicited howls of knowing laughter from IT geeks who were tasked with supporting a user base that, by and large, had recently encountered their first computer at work.
But the fact that today's knowledgable workers are powering users with a subset of available tools poses a challenge, because the subset of tools that any particular employee is proficient with may not overlap with the subset of tools that your IT staff is prepared to purchase and support. This being the case, you have to decide where in your organization you want the resulting lost productivity and frustration to happen--in your IT department (a cost center) as it struggles to adapt to user preferences, or in your broader user base as it struggles to adapt to IT's preferences.
