I have a rule of not blogging directly about the things I do at the day job, and of maintaining as much separation between “online life” and “work” as is practical. However, I’m going to venture pretty deep into the boundary between the two for a moment.
At the office, I’m considered a power user. I have a bit of a hacker’s mindset, and a bit of a reputation of finding workarounds in the face of resource limitations through official IT channels.
So, it is in that context that I’ll openly wish that a certain few folks check out this article at Info World:
Here’s a sobering statistic: Eighty percent of enterprise IT functions are being duplicated by folks outside of the IT department, says Hank Marquis, director of ITSM (IT systems management) consulting at Enterprise Management Associates. In other words, for every 10 people doing IT work as part of their jobs, you’ve got another eight “shadow IT” staffers doing it on their own.
You probably know them. They’re the ones who installed their own Wi-Fi network in the break room and distribute homemade number-crunching apps to their coworkers on e-mail. They’re hacking their iPhones right now to work with your company’s mail servers. In short, they’re walking, talking IT governance nightmares.
But they could be your biggest assets, if you use them wisely.
No, I haven’t installed a guerrilla wireless access point on corporate property, and I have no desire to check corporate email on my phone. But otherwise, it’s nice to see someone else advocate accepting some of us corporate non-IT folks as not being complete idiots who need to be protected from ourselves.
(Although, from my informal IT roles…I can see how IT and network support folks could have such a bias.)
