In the old days it was relatively easy to control IT. Employees almost never installed their own mainframes, after all. Today it's different. Anyone can plug in a Wi-Fi solution, with our without the IT shop knowing anything about it. That threat is pushing CTOs to implement wireless LANs on the fly, sometimes without adequate time to prepare or prioritize.

"This was something that everybody in both of our offices wanted right from the very beginning," said Gary Henry. "Everyone was aware of it and aware of what it could mean." As chairman of the technology consulting firm Dominion Digital, Henry knew he needed to move first, rolling out Wi-Fi for his 24 employees in Richmond and Charlottesville, Va. before they took matters into their own hands.

It's an increasingly common scenario.

Wi-Fi is coming in through the "back door," so to speak, with employee demand driving IT strategy, rather than the other way around. If IT does not respond fast enough, employees may well take matters into their own hands, setting up so-called rogue access points and establishing their own Wi-Fi connectivity outside of the existing corporate network infrastructure.

As a result, more and more CTOs and IT managers find themselves putting other plans on hold in order to install or configure wireless networks instigated not by corporate policy, but rather by employee insistence.