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'Shadow IT Culture' on the Rise for Businesses

End users are increasingly installing uncontrolled "rogue" technology to make good the shortcomings of thinly staffed IT departments.

By Tom Jowitt

July 05, 2007 — Techworld —

Businesses increasingly accept the existence of a "shadow" IT culture, in which end users install uncontrolled "rogue" technology to make good the shortcomings of overstretched IT departments, according to a survey.

Rogue IT includes users installing software, or tampering with existing software or macros, without the IT department's consent, according to the survey, by integration specialist Blue Prism. Budget and resource constraints often lead to elements of rogue behavior, reported by 67 percent of respondents to the survey. Twenty-four percent believed that rogue IT isn't used in their organizations and 10 percent admitted they didn't know.

It seems that end-users are increasingly aware nowadays that their IT department cannot always deliver a practical solution for their needs, which can lead to the creation of a "shadow IT culture" within an organization, whereby users actively install their own applications or find their own work-around solutions in order to do their day-to-day job.

This is often because IT departments have to manage business-critical projects, sometimes at the expense of helping business users with tactical change requests. Indeed, over 52 percent reported that working on strategic projects was the main focus for their department with 40 percent saying that delivering day to day business change requests was their priority.

Other areas of focus for the IT department included: fire fighting, application and data center consolidation, data processing, user communications, and functionality.

Under-resourced IT is blamed heavily, with more than 71 percent of respondents to the Blue Prism survey citing IT department resource constraints as the reason why they are not able to satisfy all requests from the business, followed by 67 percent of respondents who believed that IT department budget constraints were the key factor. Meanwhile, 24 percent of respondents cited an unreasonable number of requests from users as a prime reason for failing to satisfy change requests.

Of those surveyed however, 52 percent believed that they are able to satisfy over 75 percent of change requests and only 10 percent of respondents felt that they were able to manage fewer than 25 percent of requests.

Finally, the traditional perception of IT departments frowning upon rogue behavior by users is also challenged by the Blue Prism survey. It concludes that many IT departments fully understand why pockets of rogue behavior exist, and reveals these departments were equally pragmatic when asked for the best way of dealing with it.

 

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