Must have been 35 Years working for the same company that uses nonstandard terms. Or a company that hasn't accomplished jack squat that required outsourced services significant enough to have to use standard terminology. 35 Years working IT for Jack in the Box doesn't count.
Nick - an outsourced resource specialist and leader.
LOL. "Non-standard terms"?
"Shadow IT" is a term generated relatively recently by trade rags sold to executives.
It's simpler to just call it whatever it is. Unauthorized projects, a VP with a budget who wants something his counterpart at the C level said was too expensive to be done correctly, a nice departmental server that does something useful and isn't harming anything or anyone as long as it doesn't cross the lines defined by requirements for certifications or audits required by contracts or law... Whatever.
No point in worrying about whatever silly name someone gives it trying to make it look bad or good. Just analyze it for the needs of the business and whether it meets the standards of the company as well as the fiscal goals.
I hear there's "shadow pooping" going on in the bathrooms, too. Oooh. I better investigate. Haha.
One distinct benefit of working for a smaller organization is it's impossible to hide dumb stuff from everyone. It's also impossible to hide the good stuff.
If it makes it saves the company significant money, or it saves the company significant time, without putting the company at unnecessary risk... It's good tech.
One of the largest risks any IT manager has to face is the risk of inflation of costs by an outside entity. Obviously any company of any size must rely on vendors, but not watching what they're billing is a very common fiscal mistake that can lead faster to disaster than a whole lot of other things.
The company I work for paid an outsourced IT company hundreds of thousands of dollars early in their history to do nothing more than run a few audit scripts on a pretty poorly executed Windows domain controller. The scripts produced about a three inch binder of nice color charts and graphs that made it look like they were receiving a good value.
My predecessor dropped them and went to work changing the setup but not truly understanding that he needed to be responsive to business needs or at least communicate effectively why he couldn't do certain things that non-experts wanted and show them the risks those things entailed. He survived about six or seven years that way, and then was walked to the door before they'd made me an offer.
My continuation of the cleanup has mostly included utilizing resources already on hand in an industry standard way. Added a server and replaced an aging and failing firewall. Dropped telecom circuits that were too expensive and implemented ones with higher reliability and lower cost. Replaced the very old phone system with one from a reputable vendor and integrated it with our own systems. This year is moving the entire production IT "farm" off of a vendor that's overcharging and underperforming to a platform where we have complete control over the whole thing.
You just do it smart. It doesn't matter what goofy names you call it. A cleanup like this one is similar to taking the Pacific islands in WWII. There's going to be casualties and you have to take them one by one until there's no more to take. If someone in some department wants to go around us and put in something that actually works and is supportable and maintainable? Hell, I won't get in their way.
The CTO has done some of that, forcibly moving certain things to cloud services. When he does that, I'm game to follow behind with a stick and beat people off of the old unmaintainable systems and completely decommission them, rather than limp them along to keep a few people who won't move on, happy.
"The company standard set by the CTO is now X. Y will be shut down next month on the 1st, never to return. Please send any concerns about missing features or pricing for this change to us and copy the CTO, or here's my phone number and it's always on. Attached please find departmental pricing estimates for this service. Thanks, Nate".
Whatever works. The internal chat server gets shot in the head next month and the CTO chose the outside vendor and product and had been using it for his teams for a while. One less virtual machine to manage, patch, upgrade, and maintain. No client to install on system images. The outsourced cloud system is nearly 100% self-service and allowing specific admin users is a piece of cake.
Win/win. IT never suggested a change because those were all "sunk" costs and budget wasn't allocated to make that change. CTO had a budget and a credit card. Good for him. Go "shadow" IT! Fine by me.