Shadow IT: Is it getting better or worse at your org?

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I take a somewhat harsh view on the very concept of shadow IT, because since the beginning of our profession in the 60s, we were the ones in the shadow of core business value, and often in the basement to boot. The 90s quality crisis (mainly through large ERP implementations that demonstrated IT is core to performance) led to the good engineering, service, architecture, governance practices of post Y2K. But also the rise of this so-called shadow-IT, working with the VBA, Sharepoint and similar "horrors" we enterprise professionals focused on stamping out. Now, in the digital era, we have a seat at the table, but the so-called shadow IT has also been alive and well, pushing us to engage in business and take an agile and pragmatic approach to generating business-value. And it is now we can look around the table and realise we were in the shadow (as great as our fantastic modern-cloud-footprint is) always and that our business technologists (let's call them what they have always been) have filled in the gaps over the decades, helped us significantly with innovation provocations and corporate patience.
So my vote was n/a. It was always good, not always friendly but always good, and it's still good to engage in the dialogue of professional information technology, project management and service delivery with the business value of business technologists. Messes can be made by both parties, and the one not any more often than the other.
imho. ymmv.

Shadow IT: Is it getting better or worse at your org?

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