Forget 'shadow IT' – it's 'self-starting IT' now When VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger dropped in to Sydney a couple of weeks ago, he had a new phrase to share: “self-starting IT”. Gelsinger prefers that term to “shadow IT”, the term describing adoption of software-as-a-service and/or cloud by folks outside the IT department, often without the IT department's knowledge. Never mind …
But as a man who heads a company that's a big enabler of this he would want it to be, wouldn't he?
Anyone remember they put "plus" as a keyword in COBOL because they thought managers could not handle "+" ?
How about "Better Than Excel*"l
*Sales database tool of choice.
"... this is going against corporate policy and procedure. In my world, such loose cannons are terminated without so much as a by-your-leave."
Agreed, but my experiences with these type of folks, is they are smooth talking, fast walking snake oil sales types that come in schmooze/dazzle the board with what they say they can do for their dept, and get approval to pull their whole dept off the grid from normal IT.
Oddly enough they actually do have the talent necessary to do it (at first), some brilliant engineers who can handle it, and it works great for about a year, maybe TWO. Their brilliant/but short handed staff which had been working just fine? They've had attrition, and the replacements aren't as capable as their predecessors, OR their predecessors didn't document themselves well enough for a replacement to step in and have a snowball's chance in hell at success, and they leave. Starting in on year 3 or 4? Its falling apart or has collapsed completely, the department is in a lot of trouble, and begging corporate IT to help out, and bad mouthing IT to the board for not being team players... Effectively a Kobyashi Maru scenario for Corporate IT... (I've also seen where it went wrong from the get go, but the end result is the same, somehow the rogue's failure was still IT's fault)
Moral of the story, hire/retain ONE smooth talking snake oil type in corporate IT to politically counter the rogue in whatever dept that is pitching a breakaway movement.
Unknown Provenence IT
I too have been one of those poor saps working to discover why the (your expletive goes here) Director cannot get mail on his phone any more only to discover he is now trying to use the Yamhanuchoki27000+ he found when he last when to the Far East. This being the same Director that wrote the Corporate Standards defining the IT procurement process.
"Might give pause for thought about who they are sharing with and also those "high enough up" to ignore policy wouldn't want to share, they want their own ;)"
Yep, seen that, and as a result, NOT a fan for outsourcing anything other than janitorial services. After having gotten a contract QA engineer up to speed, they were re-assigned to a DIRECT competitor. I was LIVID, and objected to the higher ups. I don't know if it did any good, but the QA Engineer was reassigned back to us a quarter or two later. You really have no idea on contract stuff WHERE your trade secrets go ultimately, and there is no real way to protect yourself and still have the outsourced resource do their job.
"Policies and Compliance Not Needed, we'll just ask someone to secure & integrate our systems later."
"My Employees Are Just Being Difficult and Expensive and these people were so nice."
"My books are managed in Luxemburg, My staff are managed in London, My Customers are managed in the cloud, my systems are no longer managed as a cost saving measure. "
As well as SaaS and cloud services bought using some manager's corporate credit card there is the entire shadow IT cottage industry of hundreds of bored droids deciding that they are best placed to solve an IT problem using MS Office and VBA macros. Which means that when old Reg from accounts goes up to the great pencil box in the sky that his carefully constructed pile of 950 interlocking spreadsheets, Word documents and Access databases collapses because there's no one there to tweak his hard-coded filters, string substitution and incredibly slow database selection statements that mean that a sub-contractor can get paid this week.
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