“Shadow IT comes out of hiding.”

That could be the title of John Hagerty’s Expert Opinion this week.  It his piece, John quotes an SVP of technology as saying “You need to embrace it, not fight it.”

While John focuses on analytics and the impact of business users on funding and implementing BI initiatives, Shadow IT does not restrict itself to one department. Why should the sales folks have all the fun?

Out of Bounds
Analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe defines Shadow IT as “technology that has been deployed (and once in a while maintained) outside of the formal IT organization. Commonly it refers to teams or groups who figure they can do things better and cheaper than by going through the normal IT channels.”

Oh, and he also calls it “a plague on content management.” Is this what’s become of what Hank Marquis called a “disturbing new reality” back in 2006?

It was inevitable with software-as-a-service, cloud computing, distributed applications and the infiltration of consumer technology into the business world that users would eventually take IT matters into their own hands, to some extent. But I think it’s going to take a major paradigm shift for IT as a whole to embrace an empowered user community.

Will You be Assimilated?
Issues of governance, maintenance, quality control and security all present challenges. But I think John has it right: resistance is futile. Blogger Dion Hinchcliffe has a great piece on how the cloud is accelerating this shift.

And Phil Wainewright has already coined a term for it: “People-oriented architecture.“

“We now have information technology that’s sophisticated enough to fit in with how human beings work and behave, and that’s why people-centric IT is a defining theme for the new decade, requiring information technologists to develop new skills and ways of working that deliver results the people demand.”

Sounds like a paradigm shift to me.