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Shadow IT.
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Aug 12, 2022 16:52
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| # ? May 25, 2024 14:32 |
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That term extends to cover all kinds of things. I've seen a Win2K server that nobody knew about, people doing all their work from personal devices having lost their own, a department that went rogue and started building their own backup network quietly, and entire companies bought and integrated without telling IT. All at the one place 
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Aug 12, 2022 16:58
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shadow IT
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Aug 12, 2022 17:08
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devmd01 posted:Shadow IT. 
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Aug 12, 2022 17:09
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You can streamline it to Sh.IT
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Aug 12, 2022 17:27
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dragonshardz posted:You can streamline it to Sh.IT lol
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Aug 12, 2022 17:31
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I prefer to call it business-aligned applications. Shadow IT has a negative connotation in that I might have to deal with it
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Aug 12, 2022 18:41
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TITTIEKISSER69 posted:Is there a term for software that people are using but IT has no knowledge or documentation of? E: D'oh. Didn't refresh the page.
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Aug 12, 2022 19:24
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Shadow IT happens because a business need isn't being met. It's a symptom of a larger problem, usually a stagnant IT department that is either unwilling or unable to provide needed services.
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Aug 12, 2022 19:29
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We have shadow IT because management won’t let us grow our team. So departments end up having to figure poo poo out on their own.
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Aug 12, 2022 19:31
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The Fool posted:Shadow IT happens because a business need isn't being met. It's a symptom of a larger problem, usually a stagnant IT department that is either unwilling or unable to provide needed services. This is a part of it, but its also a very common scapegoat answer. Shadow IT happens because parts of the business are too lazy and too reckless to attempt to do things the right way. Leaders and engineers want to become sole decision makers and implementors for things they don't have total authority of. No random marketing director, you child, you fool, you moron, you aren't authorized to open a google analytics services under your personal gmail account and do company business on it. You are going to be found out and you are going to be poo poo upon. We own our domain in this space for a reason. The company-must-own-it. I have found that partnering with my finance folks has become an extremely effective tool for finding this nonsense where the tech is not. Want to get reimbursed for an azure tenant you spun up yourself? Ol sickening is calling you in teams. 
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Aug 12, 2022 19:57
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I've worked as part of operations functions pretty much my whole career and the shadow IT stuff that arose there was generally in the form of horrible excel/access combination "applications" built because a director didn't want to spend money on an actual system or transfer any budget to an IT function to maintain and support it. So you got pockets of people like me who were pretty good at hacking poo poo together with the Office software we had for "free" who gradually got moved from front line work into "analytics" functions that grew until a reorg hit or someone higher up noticed that the 500 fte that were supposed to be handling phone calls was actually 475 because there was two teams of "analysts" building poo poo (and a couple of people that middle managers had turned into personal assistants that they weren't supposed to have) and ordered everyone back on the phones.
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Aug 12, 2022 20:32
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The Fool posted:Shadow IT happens because a business need isn't being met. It's a symptom of a larger problem, usually a stagnant IT department that is either unwilling or unable to provide needed services.  at the username post combo here. Truly masterful work.
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Aug 12, 2022 20:55
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Your post would have more impact if I was wrong.
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Aug 12, 2022 20:57
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I've done a bit of shadow IT at my side job and I'm not happy about it but I'm even less happy about there being one IT guy who has a 50/50 chance of replying and takes a week to do so despite nothing ever seeming to get done to the point that other departments have outright hired MSPs and nobody has said anything. And the computers they issue are from the first Obama administration and were slow then, so we've had to get our own laptops just to have something that remotely functions. I'd feel like the IT guy is overworked and understaffed but as far as I can tell from talking to other departments he doesn't actually do any work and has been on vacation at least 5 weeks so far this year just based on out of office notifications when I try to reach him. He doesn't even have a company iCloud account set up for device management so he has to call old employees to try to find out their PINs to reassign them. I mean, I guess you get what you pay for, which is someone with no tech skills who reportedly has no issues breaking the law and I can't give details beyond that without doxxing myself.
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Aug 12, 2022 20:57
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I'm obviously biased and probably on the defensive working in IT, but I think "shadow IT happens because corporate IT are too slow" is a bit of a cop out. Regardless of how great your IT department is and how well resourced they are, there will always be a marketing team that needs to share a large video file and gets out the corporate card to buy a subscription to WeTransfer. Is it the fault of the IT department that the person responsible forgot about the existing cloud storage solution that the company has in place? Is it IT's fault that they opened a ticket to ask the question but had done such a poor job at planning their tasks that any response arriving any later than ten minutes would cause them to miss a deadline? I don't think you could reasonably claim that either case has anything to do with a perceived underperformance by the IT team. If there's any fault going the way of IT it would be that the systems are configured in such a way where it's possible for someone to upload files to a third-party service - but implementing something like that doesn't solve what the perceived problem is (we have nowhere to upload videos to, IT are too slow at responding), it just keeps the lawyers happy. If you go down the path of "it's the fault of IT that you went against policy and did [x]" then you end up with every member of your helpdesk having to perform some sort of executive assistant role, which presumably isn't what they were hired for and isn't where their skills are. Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Aug 12, 2022 |
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Aug 12, 2022 21:07
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If a business unit is unable to plan and communicate their needs, that is absolutely on them not IT. But IT policy doesn't happen in a vacuum, and it is absolutely IT Managements responsibility to have an open dialogue with every business unit about their needs and to develop a policy set that enables the business to function as a whole.
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Aug 12, 2022 21:16
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Let's be honest, there's shithead managers and shithead end users that can both be the problem in this scenario. Shadow IT existing is indicative that a problem exists somewhere in the pipeline, but the idiot in the equation is very situational.
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Aug 12, 2022 21:34
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Fil5000 posted:I've worked as part of operations functions pretty much my whole career and the shadow IT stuff that arose there was generally in the form of horrible excel/access combination "applications" built because a director didn't want to spend money on an actual system or transfer any budget to an IT function to maintain and support it. So you got pockets of people like me who were pretty good at hacking poo poo together with the Office software we had for "free" who gradually got moved from front line work into "analytics" functions that grew until a reorg hit or someone higher up noticed that the 500 fte that were supposed to be handling phone calls was actually 475 because there was two teams of "analysts" building poo poo (and a couple of people that middle managers had turned into personal assistants that they weren't supposed to have) and ordered everyone back on the phones. My favorite thing is when the hacked-together Excel/Access monstrosity becomes Business Critical and IT has to support it despite having no idea how it works or access to it.
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Aug 12, 2022 21:48
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Business critical Access sucks rear end and Microsoft would get all good will in the world if they stopped making Access.
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Aug 12, 2022 21:50
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There are definitely BOFH-style IT departments that deny everything they can for one reason or another, but I'd definitely die on the hill that the majority of shadow IT situations fall under either "user/manager didn't even consider that this should involve IT" or "user/manager is intentionally avoiding involving IT".
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Aug 12, 2022 21:57
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In my experience, a non-trivial amount of Shadow IT is made up of requests that were shot down by infosec (usually for a good reason) that the requestor went ahead and did anyway (except off-the-books and with no monitoring or security). Can't really pin that one on BOFHs in the IT department.
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Aug 12, 2022 22:07
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I sorta have to do shadow-IT-like stuff at work because its not worth it to have our MSP come fix printer in the middle of the night during weekend and its affecting production. In my defense i document what i did "Control room X printer failed with errors such and such, loaned parts from less-critical printer, got critical-printer fixed. MSP needs to bring a new macguffin for printer model Z with them when they come on Monday" Or "Scada station monitor for X broke, stole a display from unused/less critical PC. Maintenance/MSP needs to bring a new one at some point. Scada station only has Displayport"
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Aug 12, 2022 22:59
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Sickening posted:I have found that partnering with my finance folks has become an extremely effective tool for finding this nonsense where the tech is not. Want to get reimbursed for an azure tenant you spun up yourself? Ol sickening is calling you in teams. Hey that azure tenancy actually makes us money, no need to reimburse anything  It's also the companyname tenancy that our (outsourced) IT literally does not support because, to the best of my knowledge, it wasn't added into their contract when the last merger happened. That was 2 or 3 years ago and the situation hasn't changed since.
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Aug 12, 2022 23:00
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Sormus posted:I sorta have to do shadow-IT-like stuff at work because its not worth it to have our MSP come fix printer in the middle of the night during weekend and its affecting production. That's not Shadow IT, just garden variety end-user resourcefulness. Shadow IT would be buying an entirely new printer or something.
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Aug 13, 2022 00:47
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In summary, computer janitoring is a land of contrasts.
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Aug 13, 2022 01:45
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FMguru posted:In my experience, a non-trivial amount of Shadow IT is made up of requests that were shot down by infosec (usually for a good reason) that the requestor went ahead and did anyway (except off-the-books and with no monitoring or security). Can't really pin that one on BOFHs in the IT department. To be fair, they are correct. gently caress that guy hard. He's the biggest security vulnerability the company has.
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Aug 13, 2022 02:03
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wolrah posted:There are definitely BOFH-style IT departments that deny everything they can for one reason or another, but I'd definitely die on the hill that the majority of shadow IT situations fall under either "user/manager didn't even consider that this should involve IT" or "user/manager is intentionally avoiding involving IT". This 100%, and usually the second. Management types don't like being told "no". The lovely ones go their own way, everyone else be damned.
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Aug 13, 2022 02:39
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TITTIEKISSER69 posted:Is there a term for software that people are using but IT has no knowledge or documentation of? umbrella of shadow it probably applies edit oh lol, whole discussion. in my experience, shadow it happens when IT says no to people but it's more than that shadow it happens when IT doesn't understand business processes deeply and thus aren't able to help proactively offer ideas functional it is a two way street of users being brave and asking for things rather than hiding their needs plus IT knowing the business units well enough to say "oh you're doing this thing, honestly it's not hard to make Thing Better these days, would you consider...." Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Aug 16, 2022 |
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Aug 16, 2022 00:18
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The best is when the IT department already has a thing that suits the needs of the process and everything is being acquired sanely as a single business. The worst is when someone thinks there’s a one size fits all solution, forces tons of business units/teams into it because it’s cheap as gently caress, and then everyone sets about working around or abandoning. looking at you sharepoint
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Aug 16, 2022 00:41
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I have one lived in example of SharePoint working as a genuine, massive application handling a huge number of functions for a historically extremely challenging administrative field the key to the success was that the project manager was an extraordinary communicator and they spent a solid four years designing and building the thing out, with extra emphasis on design I think that SharePoint so often fails because people see "OOOOOOOH, the end user is an empowered power user!" and just hope that apps will build themselves over time without the same huge investment of design work behind any successful erp
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Aug 16, 2022 02:06
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I've never seen a corporate SharePoint that wasn't just a cloud fileshare. What have I been missing out on?
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Aug 16, 2022 02:29
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Potato Salad posted:I have one lived in example of SharePoint working as a genuine, massive application handling a huge number of functions for a historically extremely challenging administrative field For every one success like you’ve seen there are ten thousands abject failures
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Aug 16, 2022 02:31
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The organization needs to invest in Sharepoint. It's not a magic bullet, it takes a lot of loving work. Our org doesn't think we need a dedicated SP admin, so we outsourced it because "how much work can the guy really get from our users". 150 grand later and they still arent convinced.
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Aug 16, 2022 02:54
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Right into my veins
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Aug 16, 2022 21:21
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Just needs FINAL USE THIS ONE
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Aug 16, 2022 21:22
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Thanks Ants posted:Just needs FINAL USE THIS ONE (2)
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Aug 16, 2022 22:16
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I was able to use my powers for good yesterday. A friend is working from home and their boss wanted them to be mostly 'available' on Teams (the web app). The ethics of that aside, I started looking at solutions to allow them to step away from the computer without going to an Inactive status. A quick google search shows a variety of tricks/scripts to defeat Teams activity monitoring: powershell scripts, sitting the mouse on a mechanical watch, external jiggler etc... I ended up going for the simplest solution of placing something just heavy enough to compress the PAGE-DOWN key. Works like a charm!
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Aug 18, 2022 15:03
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_DO_NOT_COPY(3)
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Aug 19, 2022 02:17
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Knormal posted:We're making a push to get users to open tickets on the self-service portal rather than just emailing us. They're still opening tickets in my name 
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Aug 19, 2022 03:42
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