Help for CIOs in Coming Out of the IT Shadows
- Details
- Written by Dave Carey
With the advent of Cloud computing, shadow IT has become an ever more painful thorn in the side of the IT organization. And the problem isn’t going away; it’s getting worse.
According to a recent survey of CIOs, CFOs and business decision makers in the US and Europe, conducted by Cloud services provider Canopy, spending on shadow IT will grow 20 percent this year. Half the business decision makers polled have already made a strong commitment to shadow IT, spending 5 to 15 percent of their budget on outside IT products and service providers. On average, this amounts to almost $12 million annually per firm.
Many of Canada’s leading CIOs have delved into key issues around Cloud and shadow IT at roundtables held across the country by The IT Media Group. We’ve been surprised to find that a number of CIOs are growing more comfortable with shadow IT and even using it as a means of taking some of the pressure off an already busy IT department.
Francois Lafortune, VP, Strategic Technology Initiatives at ENMAX, had his moment of awakening during the building of a $1.2 billion plant, when the business came to him, wanting to put in an IT application. (Video: Business management of IT projects) “They were absolutely successful. It was my arrogance that IT projects are different. They’re not. [The business uses] the same processes we do – they are PMI certified,” he said. “They had no problem whatsoever and that’s when I finally had to say, ‘This baby is no longer mine. You guys can do it. Go for it.’”
While Lafortune’s experience is more the exception than the rule at this point, there’s no doubt that the business is growing bolder and more confident when it comes to implementing its own IT projects. And while IT organizations may, over time, find many of their traditional areas of responsibility migrating to the business, their role should not significantly diminish, for it will become increasingly important to guide and manage the process, ensure that enterprise standards are followed, and build IT architectures that provide a sound footing for the business into the future.
Of more immediate concern with respect to shadow IT are issues such as the creation of rogue data, the siloing of information, complex contractual issues, and poor evaluation of the cost of such implementations by the business.
As Paul Lewis, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems Canada, noted at one of our roundtables, “Economic transparency is incredibly important (Video: Economic Transparency in IT). One of the first things the IT group needs to do is become far more transparent in terms of the workload they produce. If you’re managing 500 applications, you should be able to effectively cost out the per-person cost of that application.”
He added that when considering Cloud applications, the business typically doesn’t look at the effort to integrate, the effort to backup, and the effort to make sure that the application adheres to the required SLAs.
“That’s fundamentally what’s missing in most of the conversations,” he said. “You should be asking your providers and partners to help you understand how much this application costs, soup to nuts, so that when we talk about buying more product from you, we can have that apples to apples comparison.”
Great advice from Paul, and that’s just a small example of some of the excellent content coming out of The IT Media Group’s many discussions on Cloud and other important IT management topics . There’s a good chance one of these events will be coming to a city near you in the next few months. If you’re an IT executive, we’d love to have your input to these stimulating conversations.
The easy way to find out our private CIO events and get your invitation to them is by filling out the brief VIP form on our events page.
I look forward to seeing you and hearing what you have to say at our next great CIO conversation.
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