Dillard and his staff support nearly 30,000 U.S. Courts users, including judges and probation officers, on BlackBerry devices or other handhelds. Like him, he said, "they want to be able to do their work anywhere."

The looming advent of handhelds that can handle all of a mobile user's application needs is a good example of how consumer technologies are really driving what will be used in the workplace in coming years, Jones told the crowd of IT managers at the Gartner conference.

"Consumer mobile technology resistance is useless, so manage it," Jones said, borrowing a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "All the cool innovations come from the consumer side."

Corporate IT shops are beginning to recognize the impact of consumer technologies on their workers, according to Jones. For example, he cited a survey of 100 IT managers in Australia that Gartner conducted last November showing that a majority felt ad hoc collaboration tools such as SMS and instant messaging would be valuable to their companies by 2010.