Shadow IT; We Have To Embrace It

Shadow IT is a term often used to describe information-technology systems and solutions built and used inside organizations without explicit organizational approval. It is also used, along with the term “Stealth IT,” to describe solutions specified and deployed by departments other than the IT department.

Shadow IT is considered by many an important source for innovation and such systems may turn out to be prototypes for future approved IT solutions. On the other hand, shadow IT solutions are not often in line with the organization’s requirements for control, documentation, security, reliability, etc., although these issues can apply equally to authorized IT solutions.

At this very moment, the IT department at a typical enterprise is staring at a mind-numbing list of IT project requests from employees and business units — ranging from building a custom mobile app for warehouse operations to integrating Salesforce with back-end office systems.

To manage this endless to-do list, the IT department logically arranges requests by how significantly they impact their bottom line, or by whichever metric matters most to the business at that specific moment. The “winners” tend to be technology projects that boost sales or improve the customer experience. Less fortunate are more internally facing requests, such as a solution to streamline logistics. The outcome of this process is that priority requests are completed, while the majority of others languish unfulfilled or are perpetually delayed.

None of this is the fault of IT departments or the various constituencies they serve. Innovation is occurring at such a rapid pace that employees and business units are no longer content to wait weeks or months for an idea to come to fruition. It is the convergence of overwhelmed IT staff and the availability of off-the-shelf applications and cloud services that is giving rise to Shadow IT — broadly defined as applications and solutions built within an organization of which the IT department is either unaware or has not officially sanctioned.

Will Shadow IT Drive Innovation?

A 2015 global survey of 200 CIOs by Brocade found that 83 percent experienced some level of unauthorized provisioning of cloud services. Indeed, until recently, executives and IT departments viewed Shadow IT as an alarming development that introduces security and control issues. But what if Shadow IT could be converted from a perceived liability to an invaluable tool for rapid innovation and cost management? What if businesses could turn their employees into citizen developers empowered to see an innovative idea all the way through to a final product or process?

Opportunities to innovate for non-IT specialists within the enterprise are being stifled by traditional application and product development processes. The rise of Shadow IT, in part, reflects the desire by employees to move forward with projects being held up by strained IT department resources and bandwidth.

By doing so, employees become “citizen developers,” best defined as any non-IT specialist within the organization who is empowered to quickly and easily build and deploy solutions that address a specific business need/pain point without IT department support. This innovation can then spread throughout the organization as other units become aware of a solution and its positive results.

What Role Should IT Department Play With Shadow IT?

Negativity around Shadow IT is partly due to the notion that activity is surreptitiously taking place under the IT department’s nose. In a handful of cases this may be true, but it is more likely departments know activity is taking place and lack visibility into how much, by whom and what the results are. A survey of IT executives released by the Cloud Security Alliance earlier this year finds that nearly 72 percent of executives don’t know how many Shadow IT applications are being used within their organization. In fact, only 8 percent of executives say they truly know the scope of Shadow IT at their organizations.

For organizations to truly benefit from Shadow IT, there is a tangible and leading role for the IT department to play — whether it is approving underlying platforms or even discovering new projects themselves, then turning them over to citizen developers within the organization to address their specific needs and innovate.

The rise of the citizen developer will be a common theme over the next few years, and enterprises that embrace the potential of Shadow IT will be best positioned to innovate and thrive.

Credits: TechCrunch

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