More people than ever are talking about "shadow IT" nowadays. As the name implies, it's mysterious, perhaps even malevolent by some people's standards. From a traditional IT vantage point, this negative view may be somewhat justified given the risks it creates around security, compliance, productivity, and technology investment.
But let's look at it from another perspective. Shadow IT is on the rise because more people outside of IT are gaining awareness and access to technology, and harnessing it as a business differentiator. More importantly, many of these people are business leaders with growing budgets that align to their priorities. Here's how much technology budget growth business leaders expect in the next year:
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Source: Cisco Business and IT Priority Survey results
No wonder some IT people view shadow IT negatively -their budgets are relatively flat, while the technology budgets of their business peers are growing -very quickly in some cases. But there's also a huge opportunity here, provided we can simply embrace the change that's happening all around us now.
Here are some suggestions for transforming shadow IT:
Business Priority | Business Outcome | Solution |
Revenue growth | Grow revenues with new mobile apps that deliver personalized services and offers to customers | Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences |
Customer Satisfaction | Increase staff responsiveness and customer satisfaction by improving performance, reliability and security of multi-channel cloud/mobile apps. | Cisco Unified Access |
Profitability | Reduce costs and gain simplicity by running your applications on a right-sized network that delivers great user experiences over any connection. | Cisco Intelligent WAN |
Innovation | Accelerate new business models and processes by connecting people, processes, data, and things -from factory floors, healthcare facilities, transportation systems, energy grids, and much more | Internet of Things |
As more tech-savvy business leaders look for creative solutions, shadow IT may simply transform into business technology, with projects initiated by any number of groups within an organization, and budget based on measurable business outcomes. The question is, what role will traditional IT play in that scenario?
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