It’s often said that BYOD – Bring Your Own Device, is part of a broader trend of “Consumerization”.

In short staff are increasingly bringing their own home technologies into work, such as their smartphone, and using them for work purposes.

It’s a blended experience where they also continue to use it for personal use too, and so it highlights key issue areas like Identity. Is that “Work You” or “Personal You” when signed into those apps…?

Another interesting aspect of the trend is highlighted in this Google article,  Bringing Google+ To Work.

You can think of Google+ as the ability to implement your own “private Twitter”, where you can tweet messages easily, but with more granular control over who they are received by.

This is an example of consumerization, where corporate ‘shared learning’ takes place via typically what are considered Facebook-like consumer tools.

Google+ and Google Apps together: Even more powerful

Given the usual risk for corporate folks is of course the information privacy risk, then the fact it is achieved through Google’s unique ‘Circles’ method for controlling this, makes it a very fertile area for new IM policies.

This will be especially well demonstrated when Google themselves better intertwine the same method throughout all of their own products.

In this article – Google+ and Google Apps together, the author explores what this better integration might entail.