{"id":947236,"date":"2019-10-31T16:48:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T23:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chiefmartec.com\/?p=3601"},"modified":"2019-11-03T09:27:22","modified_gmt":"2019-11-03T17:27:22","slug":"a-martech-milestone-it-leaders-embrace-the-upside-of-shadow-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/a-martech-milestone-it-leaders-embrace-the-upside-of-shadow-it\/","title":{"rendered":"A martech milestone: IT leaders embrace the upside of \u201cshadow IT\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Shadow<\/a><\/p>\n

There are notable inflection points in the history of martech where you simply have to pause and say, \u201cWow, the world sure has changed.\u201d Crossing more than 1,000 solutions on the marketing technology landscape<\/a> in 2014 was one. Digital ad spend surpassing traditional ad spend<\/a> earlier this year was another.<\/p>\n

And now here\u2019s a big one: \u201cshadow IT<\/strong><\/a>\u201d is going from bad to good \u2014 even in the eyes of IT.<\/p>\n

Two recent reports corroborate this shift. Digital Disconnect: A Study of Business and IT Alignment in 2019<\/a>, a study of over 1,000 IT and business stakeholders by Dimensional Research. And The Upside of Shadow IT<\/a>, a study of over 1,000 IT professionals by Entrust Datacard.<\/p>\n

The graph at the top of this post is from Dimensional Research\u2019s report.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s remarkable that 72% of business executives think that building software apps outside of IT\u2019s control is a good thing. That\u2019s a pretty broad embrace of \u201ccitizen development<\/a>\u201d among the leaders of non-IT \u201ccitizens.\u201d It\u2019s a testament that business leaders believe the ability for teams outside of IT to shape their own technological destiny is crucial for their success.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s even more remarkable that 45% of IT executives agree<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Okay, so it\u2019s not all roses. 55% of IT executives still think shadow IT is bad. And over 70% of IT managers and staff below them agree. Understandably, the closer it is to their day-to-day work, the more uneasy they may be about \u201cnon-experts\u201d wandering into their domain.<\/p>\n

But IT leadership increasingly sees the opportunity to reframe their organization from gated bottleneck to governed enabler.<\/p>\n

\"Shadow<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s quite possible this is the \u201cacceptance\u201d stage of coming to grips with the changes of living in a digital world. 78% of this study\u2019s participants reported that shadow IT \u2014 defined as business teams researching, selecting, and purchasing technology with little or no input from the IT organization \u2014 has been increasing over the past five years.<\/p>\n

Once you realize you can\u2019t stop the river, you start to think about how to harness its kinetic energy and keep it from flooding uncontrollably.<\/p>\n

IT rightfully remains concerned about support and security issues arising from shadow IT. But the answer is moving beyond simply forbidding the sun to rise to putting in place approved frameworks<\/a> \u2014 such as low-code and no-code platforms \u2014 that enable citizen developers in business functions to build their own apps within a controlled and monitored environment.<\/p>\n

92% of IT executives agree that value can be created \u2014 38% believe significant value<\/strong> \u2014 by providing a framework that allows business users to build their own solutions that follow corporate management, governance, and security policies.<\/p>\n

\"Low-Code<\/a><\/p>\n

This solution is gaining popularity with business executives. More than a third (35%) are now aware of low-code platforms. And out of those who are aware, two thirds (65%) are already using them or plan to within the next year.<\/p>\n

Nota bene<\/em>: That\u2019s a lot of \u201ccode\u201d awareness among business executives.<\/p>\n

Not so out of the realm of reason to imagine how every marketer can be an app developer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The report from Entrust Datacard is more conservative about how much control IT should reliquish. (The study was conducted solely among IT professionals and written for that audience, so keep that in mind.)<\/p>\n

Hey, there\u2019s certainly room for debate over how light or heavy IT governance of decentralized technology should be in a given organization. Although I strongly believe that an experienced marketing technology and operations team<\/a> \u2014 rooted in the marketing department \u2014 can exercise distributed leadership here in partnership with IT.<\/p>\n

Yet even this more conservative report acknowledges the incredible benefits of shadow IT:<\/p>\n

\"Benefits<\/a><\/p>\n

Okay, that last one isn\u2019t a benefit \u2014 although it\u2019s interesting that nearly half (46%) of the IT professionals who responded disagreed that employees using their preferred technologies was more likely to introduce security risks into the company. In fact, 89% agree that employees are more likely to adhere to IT security requirements<\/strong> under those conditions.<\/p>\n

But the near universal agreement about the benefits to be gained by empowering employees to use their preferred tools \u2014 again this is in the opinion of IT \u2014 is astounding! You would not<\/em> have gotten this consensus five years ago. These would have been outlier (\u201ccray cray\u201d) opinions at best.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll just quote directly from the report:<\/p>\n

The motive behind shadow IT is good \u2014 employees simply want to use their preferred technologies in the workplace to get their jobs done. IT professionals recognize that implementing a frictionless process for deploying new technology makes employees more productive and their organizations more competitive.<\/em><\/p>\n

Survey respondents overwhelmingly indicate that employees in their organizations are more productive (97% agree), engaged (96% agree), and loyal to the company long-term (93% agree)<\/strong> when they\u2019re allowed to use their preferred technologies at work.<\/em><\/p>\n

And more than three-quarters of respondents (77%) believe their organizations could achieve an edge over competitors if company leaders were more collaborative about finding solutions to shadow IT needs from both IT and non-IT employees.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the chart from that last point on competitive advantage:<\/p>\n

\"Shadow<\/a><\/p>\n

The report goes on to discuss a number of ways that IT can facilitate this competitive edge, such as \u2014 wait for it \u2014 \u201callowing employees to experiment with certain online\/cloud-based solutions without the IT department\u2019s approval.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Did I mention that this was a report by IT for IT?)<\/p>\n

Most of the recommendations are simply variations of being more collaborative with business users to help them harness the benefits of all these different technologies they desire in an IT-compliant way. Enlightened governance, I\u2019d call it.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s still a long road ahead \u2014 longer for some than others. But let\u2019s take a moment to appreciate the significance of this inflection point. These are two reports from the front that confirm, indeed, the 10-years war between marketing and IT is over<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now we can get on with building the future together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are notable inflection points in the history of martech where you simply have to pause and say, \u201cWow, the world sure has changed.\u201d Crossing more than 1,000 solutions on the marketing technology landscape in 2014 was one. Digital ad spend surpassi…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7085,"featured_media":886458,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,14,432],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7085"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=947236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=947236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=947236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=947236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}