I understand that one of your best programmers came to you with a proposal to build an app for one of your business users. He said he could do it fast and cheap. All you needed to do is give him the green light. If anything, this is a red light.
I remember getting a call from the regional manager asking us if we could fix his accounting app. "What app," I asked? The accounting app one of the staff built in Pakistan. It was now being used in three countries in his region. This was the first I heard of it. "Where's the author," I asked. "Oh, he left for another organization." There was no documentation. Worse, it was written in a language that did not support multi-sites.
You may ask why IT was not consulted. The usual answer is that it was faster and cheaper to do it under the IT radar. That's the opportunity of "shadow IT." Until it breaks.
One of the things we ask our business leaders to think about is total cost of ownership (TCO). This looks at all the costs, including training, support, documentation, maintenance, and upgrades. It looks at these across a five year horizon. The TCO is always higher than the cost to build the app.
This is not the last word on shadow IT. There's a positive side as well. But that's a topic for a later letter. |