Let Staff Go Rogue on Tech
Companies Should Empower 'Shadow IT' From Their Most Technologically Disobedient Employees
Updated June 8, 2014 8:04 p.m. ET
Most companies are playing whack-a-mole on 'unauthorized' software.
Invision/Associated Press
Want to be more competitive? Then empower your most technologically disobedient employees.
If
you're like me, the first thing you do when you join an organization is
figure out how to avoid the Kafka-esque nightmare that is the company's
own IT system. Because let's face it, in most organizations, what
should be the simplest tasks—purchasing, booking travel, even email—are
Byzantine compared with how we accomplish them on our own.
Which
helps explain why 80% of people working for organizations with more
than 1,000 employees go around the IT department and use (or even buy)
software that lives primarily in the cloud, according to a recent survey
by market-research firm Frost & Sullivan.
There
are a dozen names for this phenomenon, but my favorites are the ones
that make it sound as though downloading Dropbox or using Google Docs is
like buying weapons from shady Eastern bloc arms dealers: "Shadow IT"
or, less commonly, "Rogue IT." The phenomenon is also known as Bring
Your Own Software, Bring Your Own Access, Bring Your Own Cloud, Bring
Your Own Device or simply Bring Your Own Everything.
Perhaps there was a halcyon era when
chief information officers were mostly occupied with making employees
more effective, but in this age of increased regulation
(Sarbanes-Oxley), security breaches (Heartbleed) and industrial
espionage, the main task of a CIO at most companies is keeping customer
data away from hackers and intellectual property out of the hands of
rivals.
As you might imagine, CIOs
aren't thrilled that most of their employees are dumping potentially
sensitive data into Web-accessible, cloud-based applications they may
have never heard of, much less vetted. But here's the thing: The
companies that clamp down hardest on outside IT are ceding competitive
advantage to those that empower employees to make their own decisions
about what they need to accomplish their jobs.
Of course, it's not as if companies have much choice.
After
interviewing a number of providers of cloud-based software about how
they have managed to insinuate themselves into Fortune 500 companies
without hiring a single salesperson, here's what I discovered: Most
companies are playing whack-a-mole when it comes to "unauthorized"
software like cloud-storage services and productivity software. As soon
as one group is banned from using a useful tool like Dropbox, someone
somewhere else starts using it. Employees just want to do their jobs,
and if corporate IT isn't moving as fast as they are, well, whose fault
is that?
Here is a typical example of
how Shadow IT makes people more productive: Many companies still control
access to files employees share with each other by keeping the files
behind a corporate firewall, or machines IT controls directly. The
problems with this approach are myriad: Employees must be connected to
their company's network to access the files; when they work remotely
they have to access the files through a "virtual private network," which
can be cumbersome on a PC and almost impossible on a mobile device.
Cloud solutions like Box, Dropbox and others allow workers to access
files anytime, on any device, and can even allow them to track all the
changes others have made to a file. Many cloud applications also allow
real-time collaboration. Google Docs lets multiple people write and edit
in the same document simultaneously, and Lucidpress lets multiple
people lay out and design the same document, each watching the others'
changes unfold even as they make their own.
Even
when it's time to pay for the (initially free) services employees have
grown fond of, they are so much cheaper than traditional enterprise
software from firms like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP that they can be expensed on a credit card.
Roger Lee,
a partner at venture-capital firm Battery Ventures, which invests
in some software-as-a-service firms, calls this model of enterprise
software "bought not sold" because employees are clamoring for these
tools, whereas in the old days well-paid salespeople made fat
commissions persuading C-level executives to adopt them.
The
implications for makers of traditional enterprise software, who grew
accustomed to a model in which employees had no choice but to use
whatever software their company bought, are huge. Users are saying, why
is this enterprise software product so bad? says Mr. Lee. The answer,
fortunately, is it doesn't have to be.
Ease
of use is a trait common to all the next-generation enterprise software
that starts out as "Shadow IT." Just like consumer technology, these
are systems that must "sell themselves," one customer decision at a
time, at least until enough people within an organization use them so
that corporate IT notices.
Once a shadow
IT service is sufficiently popular, whoever is in charge usually
conducts a formal analysis of the provider's security measures and
compliance with appropriate regulations. As long as everything checks
out, what started as an employee end-run around their own IT staff
becomes institutionalized.
It's been
said that every company is now a technology company, and if that's so,
shadow IT is the logical extension of that: Every employee is now a
technologist and should be treated as such. Thanks to "freemium"
software, mobile apps and the cloud, people now have the power to
provide their own solutions while crafting the workflows that are most
effective for them as teams and individuals.
One
survey, by Gartner, predicted that by 2015, 35% of the money companies
spend on IT will be spent by employees who don't even work for the IT
department. And PricewaterhouseCoopers found that at companies it rated
as "top performers," more than 50% of IT spending was already happening
outside the IT department. This suggests that firms concerned about the
security issues of shadow IT are missing the point; the bigger risk is
not embracing it in the first place.
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