A few months ago I was meeting with one of our clients, who stumped me with the following challenge. She said: “LEF did a great job identifying consumerization many years ago, but now everyone is talking about consumerization. You folks need another word!”

We have been thinking about this a lot since then, and generally agree. While we believe that the marketplace is still underestimating consumerization by associating it so overwhelmingly with BYOT, it won’t be long before consumerization’s larger impact in areas such as identity, privacy, security, data ownership, self-service (do-it-yourself) computing and double-deep employees also becomes clear.

Sometimes markets shift radically – consider the way the iPhone transformed the mobile phone business almost overnight. But more often, large-scale change is gradual, nearly imperceptible, yet in the end no less profound.

I have attended a lot of IT industry events over the years, but never one where the Gartner hype cycle was mentioned more often than at the recent Strata + Hadoop World 2012 conference in New York City. It is easy to understand why.

On the one hand, this was a sold-out show of some 3,000 Big Data enthusiasts keen to share their plans and experiences. The energy at the event was exceptionally high, emanating a strong sense that a new generation of business leaders is emerging. While the Big Data industry is still in its early stages, its use of cloud, open source and new architectural approaches is impressive and points toward an exciting and very different future, as data volumes increase exponentially in an IT industry driven by mobility, sensors and an internet of things.

One of the highlights of our recent Executive Forum in London was the presentation by Darryl West, Group CIO for Lloyds Banking Group. For the first time in a public forum, Darryl told the IT story behind the 2009 merger between the then Lloyds TSB and HBOS. By any measure, this was one of the largest mergers in UK business history with each bank having nearly 20 million accounts and over 1,000 branches.