Why dealing with business driven IT represents is an overlooked opportunity for most organizations
Large institutions make use of a growing number of IT systems. Both main enterprise IT systems and the broad range of supporting IT applications are handled by well-structured application maintenance teams with assigned owner roles, lifecycle management, risk and continuity frameworks etc.
But most large organizations also operate a wide range of shadow applications which typically are internally developed IT systems and support tools such as databases, batch jobs, reporting jobs, scripts, VBA code, file transfers etc. In essence, they are all IT based components which staff use to perform their daily work, and which have been developed or installed by end user staff why they are unknown to central IT and Enterprise architect units.
Large organizations want to nurture engagement, entrepreneurship, and decentralized problem solving among its staff. Its important to test new ideas, solve client requirements and make the business grow. But over time, a part of these shadow applications gradually becomes business critical without the wider organization being fully aware. Seen from both a risk and cost perspective, this is a key hidden issue as the organization needs to continue to support its clients and business partners in case some of these IT components do no longer work, need upgrades or a component owner leave or change role.
