How many IT departments does your company? One? Two? As many as you have business units? As many as you have teams? Or perhaps as many as you have employees? I’ll be very surprised if the answer is one; yes, you might have one official department but how many do you have lurking in the shadows?
Shadow IT is a fact of life and becoming more and more prevalent. Shadow IT is the stuff which users do to get their jobs done, the stuff which makes their jobs easier and even at times the stuff which makes their jobs more fun. So how do you as a Corporate IT department deal with Shadow IT and should you deal with it?
Well, firstly I would suggest that you look at what is going on in your own department. The biggest users of Shadow IT are probably your own IT people; they know the deficiencies of your infrastructure, they know the stuff which stops them getting things done quickly and they know how to get round the obstacles which are put in place to stop them.
They are often the early adopters, the gadget-heads who have the latest toys; they love shiny and new, that’s why a lot of them do the job they do. And don’t think that Shadow IT is a bad thing, for every example of something going wrong because of it; there are examples of good things.
Arguably the most successful piece of Shadow IT is actually the Unix operating system; much of the development was done quietly on under-utilised kit pretty much in the shadows of AT&T. And the way its way out of the AT&T due to the 1958 consent decree preventing AT&T entering the computer business meant that it permeated out into the wide world in a shadowy way.
The adoption of the PC was another moment where Shadow IT drove the change and forced Corporate IT to change and support a key technology that they were probably scared of. But you can pretty much guarantee that many of the technical staff in those Corporate IT teams were already playing with PCs and learning about them. Yes, even those mainframe guys who professed to hate the PC might well have been playing with those horrible PC things.
Linux in the corporate space happened because of Shadow IT; I know plenty of places that would say that they had no Linux in their data-centres that were running web-servers, DNS, network-bridges and various other key infrastructure services running on Linux. Their techies just never told them (did we!?).
Now, the use of AWS and others has been driven by a desire to do things quickly and to experiment but not having to jump through the hoops often put in the way by IT Management; we have potentially entire Shadow Data-Centres. Yes, some of it has been driven by technically savvy users but if you look amongst your deeply technical guys; they’ll also be experimenting, building their own small-scale clouds for fun.
And then there is the BYOD meme; look around your organisation, how many smart-phones, tablets, non-company laptops and the like can you find? How many are in the hands of your Corporate IT guys? Yes, many of them are probably running Android or if they are running iOS, it’s probably jail-broken but they are at the forefront of the BYOD movement.
So before you write off your Corporate IT department as being hidebound and stuck in the past; look in the shadows, what you might find is the future. And you might even be surprised to find that many of them are actually very aware about the business applications and potential; they might not want to build the start-up but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the ideas. Or at times, they think the it’s so obvious that they can’t believe that no-one else hasn’t thought of it.
Encourage them and nurture a culture of openness to new ideas; this isn’t about 20% time but it’s about listening and observing 100% of the time.
Don’t shine lights into the shadows but take time to walk amongst them; they are full of interesting whispers…
