4 ms·

This it true but I've seen orgs in the past where a business unit would happily pay quite a lot of money to avoid going anywhere near central IT. I think the m

This it true but I've seen orgs in the past where a business unit would happily pay quite a lot of money to avoid going anywhere near central IT. I think the most extreme example of slow process I saw was an organization where central IT wanted to charge $20k and take two months to quote for a project. In that kind of environment things like this with opex pricing that can be assigned to a project's budget and fast spin up are a much better option :)

MattGaiser 5y ago
At my current company, my department would be able to find more experienced contractors for well below what another department here rents them out for. So I can see internal pricing being an issue as well. Internal IT charges for quotes. MSFT just quotes. This happened at a prior company as well. IBM was routinely hired over our internal team as they were cheaper.
temp8964 5y ago
Don't you have security policies to make you must go through IT?
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  When it comes to policies from frustrating departments, people tend to find workarounds, especially if there is no easy way to enforce the rules. At a prior company, one of the only reasons we adopted anything SaaS was that IT didn't have to know it existed.
  - SCHiM 5y ago
    Ohhh man/woman. I'm a security person. I often work with my customers' central IT. I'm not going to have an opinion or judge you, but consider: You're giving people nightmares. I've seen it go very wrong (front-page news wrong). And then the threads commenting on "how incompetent can they be, blabla". I've worked with the people stressed, sad and disappointed that they got pwned because of shadow IT. It's a ticking time bomb. The cloud wont save you from shadow IT's insecurities. In two years, when you switch to another SAAS provider, or the domain changes, and the enterprise app is left in your azure subscription, and the baddies notice... Then you'll call me or someone like me, and I can earn my paycheck :)
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      I'm too junior to make decisions, but a lot of it basically came down to the organizations I have worked with all either being government or running things on quarters. In the former case there was high turnover (replace the team in 1.5 years) and in the latter cases there was high turnover coupled with a problem more than a month away not being considered a problem. So in the former knowledge poured out the door and in the latter knowledge poured out the door and nobody had an interest in anything beyond the quarter, so you do what gets you to the next review cycle. Basically in both cases the bomb does not matter as you either probably won't be there when it goes off or it doesn't matter as you miss your quarterly goal instead.
    - bachmeier 5y ago
      It usually goes something like this: We need software to do X. Call IT, they give you software that sort of does part of X, but it's some enterprise garbage where you quit your job if you have to use it. Call IT and tell them that's not a good solution. We have this other realistic solution instead. IT, not wanting to be bothered, laughs and hangs up the phone. Sometimes they'll throw in an excuse that everyone knows doesn't make any sense. The workers that need to do their job pay for an actually working solution out of other funds (or use their personal software). Things go wrong and they call you. It's the ineffectiveness of IT to help people get their work done that's the source of the problem.
      - meowface 5y ago
        A properly functioning IT department will say using the SaaS is fine as long as they conduct a security review of it and how it'll be used and integrated. (For example, if it's Dropbox and one of the proposed directories to be synced contains trade secrets, that's something they'll want to know about and deal with or prevent ahead of time.)
    - acdha 5y ago
      I've also see shadow IT be the only part of the IT operation which is safe because it was run by people with security expertise, the cloud provider has a stronger security foundation than on-premise (not uncommon), and central IT's security group was primarily a compliance shop which had lots of Word documents and not much in the way of technical skills. The way I read shadow IT is as the requirements analysis central IT hasn't done. People aren't taking on all of that extra expense because they want two jobs, they're doing it because central IT is making it hard to do their jobs. When security policies conflict with productivity, it has a direct cost from inefficiency but often a greater one by training people to think of central IT as an obstacle to be bypassed rather than an ally. That inevitably causes other problems and takes a considerable amount of work to improve.
Macha 5y ago
I worked at one place where the running joke was if central IT pushed for a solution, it was time to seriously consider the competitors to that solution.
_carbyau_ 5y ago
I've seen this arise from financial policies whereby the IT cost centre must be financially self supporting. Hence IT department has to charge everything it does, swamping everyone involved - business and IT both - in bullshit paperwork, taking time from everyone. Like a finance version of fighting entropy, you can have everything perfectly neatly ordered but it takes effort. Then someone in IT gets sick of hearing bullshit hopes and dreams ideas from business; "Ok, but what if cereal box toys were spruced up with crypto? Go cost it up will ya?" And so IT swings the financial ban hammer with $20000 quotes. Bullshit begets bullshit. There will be a "who you know" club of people from business and IT who can skip the bullshit, not fill out the financial paperwork, meet over coffee or lunch and hash out ideas. If this club does not exist, woe betide the company.

MattGaiser 5y ago

At my current company, my department would be able to find more experienced contractors for well below what another department here rents them out for. So I can see internal pricing being an issue as well. Internal IT charges for quotes. MSFT just quotes. This happened at a prior company as well. IBM was routinely hired over our internal team as they were cheaper.

temp8964 5y ago

Don't you have security policies to make you must go through IT?

MattGaiser 5y ago
When it comes to policies from frustrating departments, people tend to find workarounds, especially if there is no easy way to enforce the rules. At a prior company, one of the only reasons we adopted anything SaaS was that IT didn't have to know it existed.
- SCHiM 5y ago
  Ohhh man/woman. I'm a security person. I often work with my customers' central IT. I'm not going to have an opinion or judge you, but consider: You're giving people nightmares. I've seen it go very wrong (front-page news wrong). And then the threads commenting on "how incompetent can they be, blabla". I've worked with the people stressed, sad and disappointed that they got pwned because of shadow IT. It's a ticking time bomb. The cloud wont save you from shadow IT's insecurities. In two years, when you switch to another SAAS provider, or the domain changes, and the enterprise app is left in your azure subscription, and the baddies notice... Then you'll call me or someone like me, and I can earn my paycheck :)
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    I'm too junior to make decisions, but a lot of it basically came down to the organizations I have worked with all either being government or running things on quarters. In the former case there was high turnover (replace the team in 1.5 years) and in the latter cases there was high turnover coupled with a problem more than a month away not being considered a problem. So in the former knowledge poured out the door and in the latter knowledge poured out the door and nobody had an interest in anything beyond the quarter, so you do what gets you to the next review cycle. Basically in both cases the bomb does not matter as you either probably won't be there when it goes off or it doesn't matter as you miss your quarterly goal instead.
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    It usually goes something like this: We need software to do X. Call IT, they give you software that sort of does part of X, but it's some enterprise garbage where you quit your job if you have to use it. Call IT and tell them that's not a good solution. We have this other realistic solution instead. IT, not wanting to be bothered, laughs and hangs up the phone. Sometimes they'll throw in an excuse that everyone knows doesn't make any sense. The workers that need to do their job pay for an actually working solution out of other funds (or use their personal software). Things go wrong and they call you. It's the ineffectiveness of IT to help people get their work done that's the source of the problem.
    - meowface 5y ago
      A properly functioning IT department will say using the SaaS is fine as long as they conduct a security review of it and how it'll be used and integrated. (For example, if it's Dropbox and one of the proposed directories to be synced contains trade secrets, that's something they'll want to know about and deal with or prevent ahead of time.)
  - acdha 5y ago
    I've also see shadow IT be the only part of the IT operation which is safe because it was run by people with security expertise, the cloud provider has a stronger security foundation than on-premise (not uncommon), and central IT's security group was primarily a compliance shop which had lots of Word documents and not much in the way of technical skills. The way I read shadow IT is as the requirements analysis central IT hasn't done. People aren't taking on all of that extra expense because they want two jobs, they're doing it because central IT is making it hard to do their jobs. When security policies conflict with productivity, it has a direct cost from inefficiency but often a greater one by training people to think of central IT as an obstacle to be bypassed rather than an ally. That inevitably causes other problems and takes a considerable amount of work to improve.

Macha 5y ago

I worked at one place where the running joke was if central IT pushed for a solution, it was time to seriously consider the competitors to that solution.

_carbyau_ 5y ago

I've seen this arise from financial policies whereby the IT cost centre must be financially self supporting. Hence IT department has to charge everything it does, swamping everyone involved - business and IT both - in bullshit paperwork, taking time from everyone. Like a finance version of fighting entropy, you can have everything perfectly neatly ordered but it takes effort. Then someone in IT gets sick of hearing bullshit hopes and dreams ideas from business; "Ok, but what if cereal box toys were spruced up with crypto? Go cost it up will ya?" And so IT swings the financial ban hammer with $20000 quotes. Bullshit begets bullshit. There will be a "who you know" club of people from business and IT who can skip the bullshit, not fill out the financial paperwork, meet over coffee or lunch and hash out ideas. If this club does not exist, woe betide the company.