By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon Newspaper

Warning: I’m about to discuss some technology things (yes, again), with good reason: Information Technology (IT) is a leading indicator with parallels in every business niche, including yours.

This isn’t about IT. It’s about everything.

Control

Historically, a company’s staff has had a love / hate relationship with IT. IT’s all powerful control was easy in the mainframe days. No department could afford to get their own, much less the staff to manage it and the space to house it.

Enter Shadow IT.

What is Shadow IT?

Shadow IT is departmental IT resources purchased to achieve a result faster, cheaper and better than the result a department is getting from their company’s centralized IT staff – whether that’s one person or 1000.

Consider who has the budget and who benefits from Shadow IT’s ROI.

Somewhere in the market where tech people are trying to close a sale, there’s a hungry group of owners who would love nothing better than to take over thanks in part to the advantages provided by tools that don’t depend on the status quo and/or lobbyist-funded legislation dating back to Eisenhower.

Seek those who want to change

In many companies, IT’s primary responsibility is to make sure nothing ever changes. Not in all companies, mind you, but certainly in the misguided ones.

The act of not doing anything in a misguided company is mind bogglingly simple. That’s why startups keep going after entrenched niches where a rarefied few are doing something other than clinging to what they always did and how they did it – that is, the companies whose primary R&D budget might be smaller than their political contribution budget.

The startup crowd targets and finds ways to disrupt and displace these businesses. They do so by seeking out those who WANT to change. Those who don’t look to improve are left behind to fend for themselves – which seems to be what they want, until it’s too late.

Let me clarify the “make sure nothing ever changes” comment. It’s OK to take incremental, ever-more-feisty steps to make sure nothing ever changes in production or under peak load. It’s another thing entirely when those actions morph into “Do nothing. Change nothing. Don’t break anything, in fact, don’t touch or move anything. EVER.”

Not doing anything beyond acting in the interest of self-preservation is politician work, not IT work. It results in…

Shrinkage

CEB (formerly the “Corporate Executive Board”) reports on global corporate data and trends in that data. A few quotes from a CEB report from last year:

• IT budgets projected to shrink 75% over the next 5 years.
• Around 10% of CIOs, particularly in large multinational energy, pharmaceutical and consumer companies, already have a cross-departmental role.
• Nearly 80% of IT professionals will see multiple changes in their responsibilities, skills needs and objectives, as the IT organization adapts to changing business needs over the next five years.
• Corporate IT departments will shrink by as much as 75% over the next five years as businesses adapt to the cloud and changing economic conditions.

The result of this: Cloud computing and Shadow IT, which is often based on cloud computing.

Who invests in Shadow?

Shadow IT investors have budgets. They seek serious ROI. These are not people looking for things to remain as they are. They’re dissatisfied with how things are. They know there are tools that can work faster, smarter, cheaper.

Shadow IT requires risk, offers reward, but it doesn’t come without a price. These processes must be robust, well-documented and… work, because IT doesn’t have the desire much less the resources to research or repair Shadow IT assets and processes. Shadow investments demand full responsibility from their investors.

Shadow IT isn’t the real challenge. I think you’ll see IT and its shadows go round and round as each generation of departmental and personal computing reveals itself.

By now, you’re wondering now this Shadow IT problem could possibly involve your small business. Did he trick me into reading this far?

Shadow Everything.

No, because the thing I’m seeing more and more of is “Shadow Everything”.

The ranks of people “dissatisfied with how things are and wanting tools that work faster, smarter, cheaper” isn’t limited to IT.

They’re everywhere and they will invest in Shadow Everything. What will you invest in? And your clients?

Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.

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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.