Are the Users taking over from the IT Department?
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I heard a new term this week from an experienced CIO running a good operation, well matched to the enterprises business aims, etc. He reckoned that ‘Shadow IT’ is fast becoming the order of the day as the Users, individually or in groups, enact something locally. His problem was he didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing from the perspective of the business, though he certainly wasn’t too comfortable about it from a personal or professional CIO view.
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Bad thing! If you care about results.
Shadow IT, User computing, or the skunk works is all well and good. But, the chickens come home to roost, and the IT folks get blamed, when security, recovery, and blunders put a "below the waterline" hole in the enterprise ship.
Don't come running to me when your competitor buys a laptop with every customers' ssn on it.
Don't come running to me when the power surge corrupts your pc database that does the enterprise p&l in excel.
Don't come running to me when the alpha, beta, gamma, or bootleg software that you are running the mission critical app on goes "postal", "up in smoke", or develops the pc equivalent of an "OC7 or OC4" and you can't even find vendor, let alone get some support.
Just call India where you sent all the expertise.
Arghh. OK, beloved user, let's start putting the pieces back together. Now what is the business objective you are trying to accomplish?
There is a reason why the centralized IT is expensive. We had to pay tuition for all those lessons that you're now learning.
Reinke Faces Life 