IT in 2011: costs, consumerisation and the cloud

Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's head of research, points out that a typical, modern mobile phone is a thousand times as powerful as the first computer installed at MIT; if Facebook were a country, it would be the world's third largest.

These are not trends the CIO can fight against, and it will pay to take some time out to explore them. One idea is to take a simple, everyday task that annoys people in the business, and see if it can be done better on a consumer device, or in the cloud, or both.

After all, a Google account is free, and if you don't already have a tablet device, now is the time to add one to your Christmas list.

For more on the cloud, see IT PRO's Cloud Computing Channel.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT PRO.

Comments? Questions? You can email him here.