iCOOC Forum Q1: Thursday, 26th January 2023
Objective – To discuss the current feeling in the industry about the place and role of Shadow IT in finance, and to examine how that might develop in the coming months.
Business managers have always struggled with the slow pace of change that IT departments deliver and have long sought ways to bypass them, and it is by the term ‘Shadow IT’ that we now collectively refer to their efforts. Starting with PCs and Microsoft Excel, business users downloaded data from corporate systems and built spreadsheets to analyse data and create reports. With the advent of cloud computing and low-code development, a business can build enterprise scale applications without the involvement of corporate IT. With the advent of cloud computing and low-code development, a business can build enterprise scale applications without the involvement of corporate IT.
Terminology
The term shadow has a negative connotation and is driven by the IT organization’s desire to maintain control over the development of technology inside the company. IT departments are charged with making sure that technology infrastructure runs effectively and continuously. Technology outages can be very costly, and IT executives are on the hook to prevent them.
Furthermore, the term ‘Shadow IT’ is becoming an increasingly old fashioned one, with many preferring the far more neutral ‘citizen development’, or even to disregard the traditional boundaries with regular IT, in the belief that proper integration between the two, as we shall argue is the way for progress to be achieved, will render any separation of the concepts unnecessary.
