Shadow IT refers to business users developing their own solutions, outside of organization’s IT groups. It is often seen as risky and problematic. This article puts the practice in a different light and offers a way forward.
Three certainties
Death, taxes and the inability of your organization’s IT group to deliver all the solutions that the business needs. Not only are these certainties, but corporate technologists see them as deeply related. They perceive rogue users taxing the enterprise architecture and causing the death of consistency, compliance and sustainable solutions.
They aren’t wrong, but it’s not the answer. Shadow IT is a predictable result of the imbalance between between supply and demand. IT will never be able to meet all the needs of the business users, so they look elsewhere.
Stage left: enter Access databases, Software-as-a-Service on a credit card, Lisa-in-accounting’s home-grown apps and Jason’s customer data run by spreadsheet macros. Stage right: exit trusted data, consistent business rules, and sustainability.
Out of the shadowS
The downside of shadow IT is not caused by business users’ desire to meet their needs through self-service. It is caused by not having access to the right platforms. So, they get creative and find their own way. Rather than seeing this as a threat, technologists should provide sustainable platforms and services for power users to develop opportunistic solutions.
Key aspects of such platforms and services for business users include:
- Easy to use tooling for drag-and-drop development, delivered on a self-service basis.
- Discoverability and access to data that represents the source of truth.
- A managed evergreen runtime environment, likely cloud-based, with built-in disaster recovery.
- Pragmatic data governance to prevent the creation of new data silos.
- Regular touch points to recognize when opportunistic solutions become enterprise assets.
- Consultative services to help business users get up to speed quickly, and offer hands-on help.
- A loosely defined group of evangelists within the business, to foster adoption and support each other.
None of these are rocket science, but they require some planning and design. Ironically, those are things that corporate IT is typically good at. Smells like a win-win.
Tipping the scale
The business’ desire for technology capabilities will always outweigh what IT can supply. However, IT can tip the scale by providing a self-service capability that is designed to overcome the downsides of traditional shadow IT.
Better yet, by approaching development from a mindset of abundance, rather than scarcity, IT empowers its customers, while reducing demand on its own resources.
Ernst Rampen ©2018
