There are lots of people trying to scare IT teams into buying their products by warning about the impending doom caused by Shadow IT - you know, people running programs on a computer somewhere.
Please embrace Shadow IT. I think classic IT should lead the charge by promoting it and making it easier. Why?
Your company is under attack. For instance, consider what analyst firm CB Insights sees happening to Procter and Gamble. Dozens of companies are sniping away at Procter’s profit centers, inventing new products, new delivery systems, new pricing models that are designed to steal their customers away.
Graphic source: https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/unbundligh_PG_April2016.png
This is the attack of the 1,000 duck-sized horses, and you can’t win by stomping on just a few of them with your elephant-sized duck feet.
Your business needs to respond to each individual duck-scale attack with a relevant product offering of your own, and that means building lots and lots of small-scale applications very quickly.
- To compete against Dollar Shave Club, Procter will need a subscription service, home delivery system, and some cool new packaging partners.
- Restorsea’s new skin care regimen comes from the environmentally friendly salmon embryos found in the fjords of Norway (really - you can’t make this stuff up) and available only from very select retailers so Procter better get cracking on building their own fish egg smears (maybe I shouldn’t go into cosmetic marketing anytime soon) in fifteen ingestible flavors with fifteen select retailers.
That’s five or ten new applications just to respond to two of the competitors, and there are dozens more that Procter will need to get running soonest. Or else succumb to the tiny horses.
Your business is in the same situation. We all are. To succeed we need to enable our smart business teams to figure out how to execute their plans, and quickly. Cloud technology is perfect, but as Rich Hoyer points out, it’s not easy to operate effectively. Hoyer recommends “a centralized team that provides Cloud Services” to enable automation reuse (success!) and avoid cost overruns (failure!).
So embrace Shadow IT. It’s your future!
And listen to the Zenoss-sponsored 451 Group webinar on Hybrid IT, too. Hybrid is what people call Shadow IT when they’re not trying to scare you.
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