One of the best features of most modern technologies, whether designed for use inside the enterprise, or for consumer or leisure time pursuits, is the flexibility, adaptability, and personalization capability of these solutions or devices. 
Software programs are usually almost infinitely customizable - with a myriad of settings and options that users can manipulate and alter to suit their unique needs. Newer gadgets like smartphones and tablets are replete with their own sets of menu and option settings, and the applications and programs we load onto these devices typically come with their own options and opportunities for us the users to shape the behavior and functionality of these applications to meet our needs. Choice - and the ability to form, create, and adapt our computing and technological environments to our precise needs has never been more within our grasp.
In fact, particularly in software solutions designed for and sold to enterprise and corporate users, this ability to 'shape' or personalize the technology to meet company, work function, and even individual needs is quite often touted as one of the most attractive and beneficial features of the solution.
Certainly, enterprise software companies can't predict and thus design for all the potential differences and nuances in organizational processes, practices, and preferences; thus by building in the capability for end users to maintain some control of the operation and interface of said software solutions, they can offer the benefits of almost custom or bespoke applications, but still with the reliability, structure, and process discipline of good enterprise software.
But does all this flexibility and personalization capability in both enterprise and consumer technologies and devices really get exploited by the majority of end users to tailor their experiences, and be extension, improve the utility of these solutions and gadgets? Well chances are, not so much. Check some of the observations about software users and default settings from a study of Microsoft Word users on the User Interface Engineering blog:
We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.
We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.
What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.
This was particularly curious because some of the program’s defaults were notable. For example, the program had a feature that would automatically save your work as edited a document, to prevent losing anything in case of a system or program failure. In the default settings for the version we analyzed, this feature was disabled. Users had to explicitly turn it on to make it work.
Of course, this mean that 95% of the users were running with autosave turned off. When we interviewed a sample of them, they all told us the same thing: They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,” several of the participants told us.
I think there is some really useful advice in this little experiment with MS Word users, while building in flexibility and options and choice is certainly important in any modern software solution or new device, those of us involved in building or deploying these kinds of technologies should keep in mind it is likely only a very small minority will leverage the flexibility and personalization features we tout so stridently and spend so much time developing.
While choice, options, and freedom to adapt technology are all necessary components in the modern enterprise and consumer software age, let's not forget there is quite a lot to commend software and hardware solutions that simply work. Turn them on, activate them, answer a few questions in configuration sure - but the sooner solutions can start solving business problems and delivering positive impact to users, without asking users to morph into armchair software developers is really the hallmark of a great solution.
So I'll toss the question out to the readers - how important is flexibililty and personalization in your technologies and how important is it to you for them to simply work right away?