You already can guess at the direction of change, if not its velocity, by noting what the emergence of Web-based communications and content has meant for service providers.

Simply, value moved beyond the high-margin walled gardens, leaving a good chunk of the business in “bit pipe” mode. Something along those lines might occur again as enterprises and other organizations discover they can source features, functions

and applications directly from the Web, on a hosted basis.

Of course, the corresponding good news is growing demand for additional broadband access and transport services. In part, the looming changes simply mean that Web applications are becoming more important, as work forces become more distributed and Web-based communications likewise are more essential.

But the coming transformation is more than simply a matter of more Web apps being used. There is a possible change of business computing and communications architecture coming. Collectively, we might call all the changes a “Facebooking” of enterprise communications and computing.

A second hugely-important change is the “mobilizing of the enterprise,” and the two trends are related. A highly-distributed mode of working heightens the importance of network-based applications easily accessible using a Web browser and any browser-equipped device.

But why will social interactions be the dominant purpose of enterprise networking? “In the end, we are hired and paid for functioning as sentient, social beings,” says Austin. As rote tasks are automated, people then are freed to think, discover, create, interact, team, lead, manage, learn, evolve and so forth, Austin notes.

“David Autor’s 2003 study of job-skill requirements in the U.S. demonstrates, through analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data, that the most sought-after skills across the U.S. economy are skills requiring the ability to interact with others creatively,” says Austin.

“Telephones help people in different locations talk with one another,” says Austin. “They do not automate the process of having a conversation.” And social networking is all about conversations.

“Various studies find that the Internet transforms social capital toward distributed communities and new friends,” says Austin. “It may or may not compromise social capital by allowing people to ignore the local community and it may, at least sometimes, supplement social capital by augmenting existing social relations.”

And though some might think that mostly means more high-quality bandwidth at a handful of large enterprise sites, it also means more high-quality bandwidth in the “couple of megabits” to “scores of megabits” range at many more locations, to support an increasingly distributed and mobile work force.

Moreover, recall the change in voice communications from “phones calling places” to “phones calling people” as mobiles augmented landlines. Business broadband is going to follow a similar path: from “bandwidth to buildings” to “bandwidth to individuals.” That doesn’t replace the need for special access or Ethernet connections to “locations.” It does mean there also will be a huge market for “personal broadband” connections as well.

That, in turn, should stimulate sales of all sorts of “fixed-mobile convergence” services, higher bandwidths to fixed locations and lots more mobile broadband.

There are other equally-important changes coming, though. Chief among the changes is a shift of value away from classic “enterprise class” software and towards “consumer grade” hosted services.

Even though most small businesses still prefer simple “voice and data” services, organizations of all sizes increasingly are confronting the need to permit use of all sorts of “consumer” grade software and technology beyond the office phone system, local area network and standard office productivity suites.

“Information technology is no longer under the control of the IT organization,” says Gartner Group’s Austin. But that’s not even half the story. Enterprise software and communications innovation now is coming from consumers, the Web, mobile, Facebook, Google and all sorts of similarly unusual places. That’s an unprecedented situation.

In fact, enterprise technologists in many cases are behind the curve: consumers have access to powerful, Web-based tools that exceed the capabilities of enterprise tools.

“The world of IT has changed dramatically during the past 40 years,” says David Mitchell Smith, Gartner Group analyst. “What was once used by thousands of extremely skilled practitioners is now used daily by billions of people.”

“Innovations that once came from a handful of large corporations (and universities) now can pop up literally anywhere,” says Smith. “Ways of using IT, particularly Internet-related phenomena, are exploding.”

“IT organizations need to bend to the realities and opportunities associated with consumer, Internet and fast-emerging technologies,” he says.

Smaller and mid-sized businesses might be in a worse situation, in some ways: they “don’t know what they don’t know.” On the other hand, smaller organizations should be able to move faster to embrace the new tools.

There is a fundamental mismatch between what enterprise IT is good at and what is happening on the Internet, says Austin.

“For investment projects, IT organizations typically spend six to eight years from initial conceptualization through selling, planning, testing and implementation of the first release,” Austin notes. Obviously, that is not “Internet time.”

“Facebooking” of the enterprise also is no mere technology issue; not simply a matter of where interesting new enterprise applications come from. “Facebooking” is one way of describing the unwillingness of younger knowledge workers to put up with the restrictions corporate IT imposes.

“We know of organizations that have extended job offers to recent college graduates only to be turned down because the companies, for example, did not allow employees to send and receive instant messages with people outside the firm,” says Austin. “That’s an extreme example but it is analogous to not allowing employees to send and receive e-mail with people outside the firm several years ago.”

Unfortunately, enterprise IT has come to be seen as an inhibitor of business change by line of business and senior executives, not to mention end users and knowledge workers. Where senior executives wanted business value, flexibility, agility, managed risks and “good enough” security, IT interpreted that mandate as requiring reduced cost and risk, in the form of “locked down” software, rigid standards and heavyweight architectures, Austin says.

In a major study of IT workplace attitudes, Gartner recently found that consumer software and non-company-owned hardware are both being broadly used in enterprises today, Mitchell Smith notes.

About 29 percent of employees and 24 percent of contractors were using non-company-owned equipment on company networks, Gartner found. Respondents expect use of non-company-owned hardware to grow to 42 percent of employees and 32 percent of contractors by 2008.

About 70 percent of respondents say at least 10 percent of their employees are using non-company equipment on company networks.

Respondents say that half of their employees are using consumer-grade software in the course of their job. About 70 percent of respondents say at least 20 percent of employees are using consumer-grade software.

The ultimate implications for business users of communications, information and applications are perhaps obvious in some ways. “Office” technology won’t be seen as “powerful” or “sophisticated” or “easy to use,” compared to alternatives people simply will have access to on their own.

Many, if not most users, have more bandwidth under their own control at home than they do at work. Their home PCs are more capable than their work machines; their mobiles more powerful than “work issued” devices.

Consider all the important recent innovations that have infiltrated the enterprise from the “outside,” from users who found better tools outside the enterprise than inside it:

Internet

Mashups

The PC

The GUI

Windows 95

Instant Messaging

SMS

VoIP

Peer-to-peer applications

Mobile phones

Personal Digital Assistants

Wireless local area networks

Desktop search

Home networking/cheap broadband

Rich media

Large displays

Podcasts

Social networks

IP videoconferencing

Internet-based storage

“Maximum innovation occurs at the edges,” says Smith. That includes the Internet, mashups, consumer technologies and communities.”

Consider the implications a simple but powerful innovation—“search”—has had on user expectations of how data is retrieved, the ease of retrieving information, and who should have access to information. Basically, search engines such as Google have created user expectations that information should be easily accessible whenever it is needed, using any standard Web browser and any device—tethered or mobile—with an Internet connection.

That isn’t to say all enterprise technology comes from the consumer market. It generally is true that, 20 years ago, the majority of new technologies appeared first for defense and business uses before making their way into consumer markets.

Today, the majority of innovations appear first in consumer markets. But some technologies still start with business usage first. Gartner analysts call that an example of “reverse” consumerization.

The most prominent example is the smart phone, especially the Research in Motion “BlackBerry.”. However, most smart phones are purchased by what Gartner calls “prosumers,” generally “power users” who purchase devices at retail and bring them into the business setting.

The other somewhat obvious challenge for enterprise IT is to better balance the messiness and openness of “consumer” technology coming in from the edge of the enterprise with the need for some centralized control and security.

Consumer-grade technology tends not to feature the level of security many enterprises or smaller organizations might require. Edge applications also introduce some heightened risk of “spam,” virus and other unwanted side effects. Enterprises will have to contend with that.

What enterprises and most businesses probably cannot safely do is forbid the use of such tools. Business agility, flexibility, cost control and ability to attract and retain the most-capable associates may hinge on some degree of openness to Web and consumer technologies.

For perhaps the first time in the history of business and large enterprise computing, innovation is in the hands of the users, says Austin. “Control must be balanced with openness.”

One perhaps unusual impact of “Facebooking” or “Google-izing of the enterprise is the growth of hosted computing architectures in place of the centralized model most organizations now use. In the future, it will be possible for enterprises to “outsource” their mainframe, server and even some portion of client computing requirements to Web-based alternatives.

Where today enterprises run large, redundant data centers, they might in the future shift some, if not much of that overhead, directly to third parties that specialize in hosting enterprise applications and data.

In many ways, that is simply the storage extension of what Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already are doing: providing users large quantities of data storage with a Web front end. On the application front, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a way to use Web-based productivity applications.

Communication, collaboration, content, learning, Web conferencing and team collaboration will be ripe for software-as-a-service approaches, says Austin.

Then there is the matter of social software. “Messy, unstructured and informal is good for people, says Anthony Bradley, Gartner analyst. “You can’t engineer social processes in formal ways.”

As consumers increasingly shape enterprise computing, information and communicating strategies, one thing is quite clear, says Jack Barnett, Alcatel-Lucent Professional Services chief architect: “Value is shifting from connectivity to personalized services.”

That doesn’t mean a direct, one-for-one correspondence between “consumer” tools and behavior, and enterprise tools and behavior. It does mean quality of experience now becomes a decisive factor in consumer—and hence enterprise—services and applications, says Chris Kapuscinski, Alcatel-Lucent program manager.

That’s one reason why Microsoft has launched its Connected Services Framework, for example. It allows service providers to create manage and aggregate Web services across networks and devices.

To be sure, neither enterprise information technology managers nor telecom technology managers are likely to be completely comfortable with loosely-coupled services. But that’s simply the way the architectures are headed.

To some extent, the change in enterprise communications and applications infrastructure will be driven by the arrival of huge numbers of “digital natives” into the work force.

Basically, every organization now is at the front of a process that will replace retiring “baby boomers,” by definition “digital immigrants” who were not born into a world where digital technology was so pervasive, with “digital natives” who always have lived in a world where mobile phones, the Internet, PCs, gaming platforms, social networking and texting were part of the background of life.

They will bring into the organization their own preferences in terms of devices, applications and collaboration tools, likely based on Web 2.0 and mobile concepts such as communities, blogs and mobile messaging.

Some of the changes are relatively minor. Users might shift from PC-based e-mail solutions such as Microsoft Exchange/Outlook to a Web-based e-mail solution such as Google Gmail. Email communications itself might be supplanted by other text-based messaging formats such as text or instant messaging. Other changes might be much more disruptive for providers of communication services and products.

As accustomed as they are to “personal communications” of every sort, the widespread use of business phone systems and desktop phones might not be so widespread when the normal expectation is that the personal mobile device is the preferred client device. Wireless connectivity of every sort will be a pervasive expectation. That will be good for mobile service providers. It might not be so helpful for retailers of communication services who do not own their own networks.

It also seems highly unlikely that organizations will be able to get along for much longer with creaky, slow information systems. Users now expect instant response when they have questions. That’s the “Google effect.” Neither customers nor customer service nor sales or marketing staffs are going to put up for long with information systems that cannot give them immediate answers.

It isn’t immediately clear how most communications service providers can benefit from this sort of trend, though, and that’s part of the challenge legacy service provider organizations face in a world where more value moves to some Web-based format.

And since people increasingly will work in distributed fashion, users will demand real-time, always-on collaboration and communications tools. That will drive demand for mobile and wireless communications solutions, among other things.

Recently, wireless e-mail has been the top priority for enterprise mobile application investments, Gartner finds. The reasons for this trend are clear enough. First, email adoption is pervasive in most organizations and plays a crucial role in supporting workflow and communications in key business processes.

Second, people and employees are increasingly on the move and need easy, efficient access to their corporate e-mail, even when far from their desks. Also, advanced mobile devices, such as smart phones and cellular PDAs, are increasingly available to support mobile applications with richer feature-sets, better performance and inexpensive prices.

Until 12 months ago, wireless e-mail had been a sort of “elite group” application, most often deployed for and used by executives in large organizations. During the past year, this situation changed: a democratization process has begun that will bring wireless e-mail to many mobile devices and will be massively adopted by business and consumer users.

Microsoft Exchange, for example, offers wireless email support as a native feature. Similarly, in the public email space, Gmail and MSN support wireless access, regardless of the chosen carrier.

Also, since users won’t really want to carry multiple mobile devices, anymore than they would willingly carry multiple notebook PCs with them—one for personal use; one for work—mobile phones will have to function as capable “after hours” consumer phones as well as business devices.

Of course, there are clear implications in all of this for service providers. Might Web applications marginalize some telco-provided applications? “Maybe,” says David Croslin, Chief Technologist of Communications, Media and Entertainment, Hewlett-Packard.

Will Web 2.0 applications marginalize IP Multimedia Subsystem? “No,” says Croslin, so long as IMS is viewed as a session management infrastructure based on the Session Initiation Protocol.

Telcos fit into the broader applications space in some pretty straightforward ways, according to Richard Bensen, CGI lead enterprise architect. They “ensure high quality access, simplify access and mobility and can provide superior customer service, for example. Telcos can aggregate services developed by third parties, provide robust content distribution and provide key communication services that are more robust than any Web application itself can provide, says Rene Sotola, CGI strategist.

Much the same can be said for channel partners of service providers, who will have to hope their service provider partners can manage to transition from legacy products to more Web-based applications.