The situation looks grim.  

More and more employees are bringing unsanctioned consumer technologies into the workplace and, if the trend continues, IT departments will increasingly find themselves swamped with maintenance and support requests and their networks teeming with unsecured devices and applications. 

Even worse, IT is helpless to stop the madness. Your only hope is to control meddlesome employees and their rogue apps by adopting something called an “internal customer care cooperative model.” 

According to “Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management,” a new and apparently Mahayana Buddhism-inspired survey/report from Yankee Group, almost half of the workers polled said they “feel more empowered than IT to control their personal IT environment.” They want IM and wikis and other social networking tools, and if their IT departments won’t supply them, workers are prepared to fill the void themselves. 

To avoid all-out IT anarchy, the report recommends that instead of trying (and inevitably failing) to stem the flow of unauthorized technologies, IT departments surrender to employees the power to manage their own IT destinies. According to Yankee Group: 

“IT must adopt a Zen-like approach to manage the technology and the rogue employee. Ceding control to end users via a internal customer care cooperative model reduces IT’s burden while improving customer satisfaction. The Zen support model is fundamentally different than most IT organizations today because it doesn’t seek to dictate policy and enforce standards, but rather set guidelines and steer users in the right direction.” 

To reach this “higher plane” of IT operations, the report recommends IT departments roll out Web 2.0 technologies — such as internal, Web-based portals — that allow employees to manage the ever-increasing legions of consumer apps and devices making their way onto corporate networks. The irony, of course, is that it’s the unauthorized introduction of mostly Web 2.0 technologies that brought us to this point in the first place.  

Regardless, Yankee Group warns that the time has come for a major change in the way IT departments interact with employees and that its Zen-like approach is the quickest path to IT enlightenment. 

“Enterprises can’t avoid consumerization or implement traditional approaches to managing consumerization in the enterprise because it’s failing,” Joshua Holbrook, Yankee Group’s enterprise research program manager, said in a statement. “It’s time for a new operating model; an IT care co-op is the solution.”