Shadow IT: Chasing Zombies of BYOD-isaster

USA: It's bad. It's rogue. It's the new underbelly to combat. It's that notoriously-invisible devil that lurks around below and beyond layers that meet a CIO's eye and nose. It's very very addictive for employees and that yuppie bracket of users spread across the breadth and depth of any company today. It's hard to nail down and still impossible to ignore.

Talk of Shadow IT, and these are some of the not-so-surprising remarks dissing this new genre of IT that has been slowly billowing right beneath the CIO's carpet. It's not hard to guess why most people would not hesitate to put a kibosh on this zombie-army of sorts. But what could be hard to absorb is why some high-profile and heavyweight CIOs are instead making room for Shadow IT inside their brains and strategic boxes.

Here's someone who would rather argue that there was a time when cell phones used to ring in theaters; and now we have figured that one out. Optimism or pragmatism?

May be his penchant for studying some delicious intersections of society, technology and people will be just the ingredient we need as David Lavenda spells out all the confusion, dichotomy and arc light around Shadow IT here.

Currently serving as VP of Product Strategy at harmon.ie, a collaboration product company for the mobile enterprise; and an International Scholar for the Society for the History of Technology, David is also presently completing a graduate degree exploring the changes in information overload over the last 30 years.

Let's try to chase some shadows and silhouettes with him here.

Hi David. You are a technology strategist, and as you put it well, someone who stays intrigued by the interactions of people, organizations and technology, with a focus on why particular technologies are successfully adopted while others fail in their mission. What is your overall reckoning of Shadow IT and how is it disrupting IT as we know it. Is it too soon to judge it as black or white?

Shadow (or ‘Rogue') IT is burgeoning because of the proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprise via BYO programs - more than 60 per cent of organizations already have such programs according to Gartner and only 10 per cent of organizations say they will never have BYO programs. Quite simply, employees increasingly want to use their devices for work.

However, organizations are still struggling with getting the proper security in place, so people typically only have access to email, calendaring and contacts via enterprise apps. Employees want to do real work, so they are turning to consumer apps in droves. Case in point, Dropbox has 200 million users, many of them are using Dropbox for work. A recent industry survey by uSamp found that 43 per cent of employees admitted to using unsanctioned cloud services (like Dropbox) for work in the last six months.

The business risks of unsanctioned consumer apps are real: data leakage, loss of control over corporate assets, and a general lapse in governance and compliance. This is a mega-trend: IT is losing control over corporate resources. If the proper precautions aren't taken, IT will become irrelevant to the business as employees select tools on their own.

Is this phenomenon an extension of the CIO Vs. CMO conflict (overlap or debate) in some way?

Budgets are moving from IT to departments as departments pick their own tools, especially mobile devices and cloud services. More power via budgets is moving to the CMO. IT must realize that it is becoming a consultative arm - it must help the organization adapt the most appropriate technology to run the business. IT must become more business-savvy and be less concerned with infrastructure and the information plumbing. The debate needs to turn into a collaborative discussion around running the business rather than a fight over budgets.

How much of a game-changer is it going to be for the industry with emergence of tech-savvy users as well as answers like Yammer, Salesforce, Google Docs etc?

 

These products/services are complete game changers. Business will never be the same. People are selecting the tools they want to use on their own. Business (i.e. IT) has to supply tools that interoperate, while accounting for governance and data leakage concerns.

The ubiquity of cloud services and the capabilities of mobile devices (i.e., sensors - GPS, accelerometers, NFC, image recognition) is enabling the anytime, anywhere enterprise for the first time. Business will take place 24/7 everywhere, all the time. If business won't supply the tools and support, departments will go out and get them on their own. There is simply no way to "unring the anytime, anyplace enterprise bell."

Is it a constantly changing-cum-running dartboard of a challenge with the way CIOs have been compelled to move from more rigor on BYOD Regulations to toning down on 'too much of a rulebook'? There have been a lot of talk on some legal and ethical intrusion concerns for employees around BYOD policies lately.

BYO programs have enormous implications for employees, just as they do for businesses. Business need to make sure BYOD programs don't turn into "Bring Your Own Disaster" for employees. Issues like privacy, data ownership and liability have huge implications. Organizations need to be concerned with the usual stuff like data leakage, governance, and the like, but now they need to also worry about employees' claims to mobile device rights.

Organizations need to be crystal clear about the boundaries for use of mobile devices for business and private use. I predict that BYOD will morph into CYOD (Choose Your Own Device), where organizations will own the device, but let employees use them partially for private use; similar to what they have been doing with laptops for years. This solves many issues including the ownership of a mobile phone number when an employee leaves the company.

Can the problem be attributed to technology advances like Cloud/virtualisation or to social-cultural issues, psychological factors or hierarchy and even usability aspects?

Every new generation of products brings with it a new set of challenges. Cloud services are no different in this respect. The Internet, PCs, laptops, etc. also introduced new challenges. I believe in Kranzberg's First Law: "Technology is neither positive nor negative, nor is it neutral." We have the power to use technology wisely or not. Cloud services and social networks just offer us the newest challenges.

There will be a shakeout whereby etiquette and social norms will develop regarding the use of these technologies. Do you remember the days when cell phones used to ring in theaters? Well, we have figured that one out; we will figure out what is socially acceptable with social networks and cloud services as well.

Can CIOs make the so-called rogue IT spin favourably some day? From shepherds to stewards, as some experts suggest, but is it possible?

Smart CIOs will embrace rogue IT rather than fight it. How? By providing safe alternatives to popular rogue IT services. For example, if CIOs provided enterprise versions of Dropbox, they would be able to get people to use them. It would be a win-win.

Companies have already spent millions on using Microsoft SharePoint for document management. It's safe and it already provides governance and compliance. So if CIOs could give a Dropbox-like SharePoint mobile app, employees would use it, and the business would benefit. That's the kind of efforts CIOs have to embrace - use the behaviors of rogue IT (desire of employees to pick their work tools) to encourage workers to use company-sanctioned alternatives to consumer apps. It's totally do-able; it just requires a change in mindset.

What else catches your eye here?

The next mega-trend is going to hit when cloud services kick in a big way. People will start to realize that their workday has become disjointed. Every app being offered to employees today really does only one thing well. For example, look at the Microsoft suite of mobile apps; there is one for Office 365, one for Lync, one for SkyDrive, one for SkyDrive Pro, one for Yammer, etc. None of these apps work together. And unlike the desktop, it is impossible to ALT-TAB between one app and another on the mobile device, nor is it possible to have multiple windows open at the same time. What this means is that as soon as apps really start to become used in a business situation, people will realize that their work information is spread out between way too many apps.

This will lead to mobile "hub" apps, which will aggregate information from multiple cloud services into a single screen experience. But this will just lead to information overload - too much disjointed information on the single screen. So context (such as location, time, social interactions, topics, etc.) will be used to automatically filter the aggregated information, thereby mitigating the information overload that will be inherent in the hub app.