Lord of the shadow IT
I have a theory that working on shadow IT projects for more than a year can push even the most self assured person to the brink of existential crisis. I also have another theory that when you are building shadow IT projects as interim solutions you are inadvertently setting it up to live perpetually.
Folks who end up doing the shadow IT projects fall in two buckets. The first bucket has business folks who have acquired technical skill sets and are willing to expand that knowledge to create tools good enough to improve efficiency. These tools may not be the most optimal solution and will often fail most coding best practices;nevertheless will get the job done. For business folks learning to code it always starts as a low stakes high reward game that is beneficial and interesting; after all its not their day job. They have solved for something that would have taken tech teams a year and 6 figure dollar budget to deliver on. The second bucket are tech folks who are often looking to move into business domains and unwittingly end up in full time shadow IT positions where even simple tools configured on unapproved SAAS platforms are looked with reverence . Nevertheless the folks in the second bucket are often stuck in a no win situation. They neither get to make critical business decisions nor do they have an entire tech toolbox to work with and most often end up second guessing their move .Because its not uncommon for businesses to advertise for data scientists or analysts when they actually need someone to build a repository of dashboards.
Working on Shadow IT projects is not without its perks. When the tools are rolled out, there is pride in achieving something extraordinary even if folks throw around terms like scrappy or band-aid fix. You have built something to help you and your peers accelerate and improve the process. You are a rock star in your team .Folks look to you in awe, for they wish they had taken those online SQL classes or signed up for those Python for beginners lesson. But they were too afraid to even delve outside their turf while you dived into the deep end of the ocean and emerged with treasures to share. Of course you might get your fair share of flak from the tech department but you might also get accolades for taking this initiative from the business teams. Every time someone mentions the tool, your tool , your heart swells with pride. People stop to thank you for saving them all that time and effort. You consider building more tools, may be become a developer full time. Everyone in the team is dependent on you and your tool to get the job done, you feel indispensable.
In a few months your team increases their dependency on your shiny new tech, you start struggling to maintain this tool while also doing your actual job as specified in your title. It started as an side initiative but now Shadow IT projects are your identity. You are never more aware of this fact than when you feel bitter that folks suggest ways to enhance your tools.There is an emotional investment in Shadow IT projects. In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, António R. Damásio noted that while our ideas come from rationality, we still continue to make decisions based on emotions and feelings. The tool calls to you , inveigles you into investing more time on it. Its a bad idea, you know that you have to stop updating this tool and transition it to the tech team. But its a knowledge that does not prevent you from adding additional plugins to what might amount to a provisional need and fugacious glory.
Inevitably, your organization continues to invest in new platforms that threaten all the work you put into these projects. You are forced to either retrain yourself or relinquish the tools to the tech team who will put it on their road-map and bake it into their enterprise solution for the next year. Until then the business team continues to use the tool but its not robust enough and you hear people starting to complain about how long it takes to load or the reports generated from the tool are inaccurate. “Primitives!!” , you think to yourself they will never fathom the time and effort it took you to build this. They do not appreciate the intricacies in making the apps glanceable. They do not understand how you were hamstrung by tech bureaucracy that prevented you from getting your own sandbox. They definitely do not understand all those server outages that forced you stay up overnight refreshing the data manually.
The magic has died and realization dawns that its time to move on. You hand over your notes, queries, tech stack to the central IT folks. Strangely you don’t keenly feel the space left by this hand-off , instead there is a sense of relief and you pride yourself in making a “strategic” decision. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson ,“So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous.” Something that consumed your work life has been weeded out.
You move on in your career. You continue to built tools because you do not want to lose the tech muscle; also you realized the recognition that comes with it. Yes its extremely hard to keep shadow IT projects going while keeping everyone around you happy. Its exhausting but its becoming reflexive ; by now you stop worrying about the caution tapes set by network admins and the floodgates of requests that opens up with each immediate need met by your shadow IT project. You cant be immured by IT administrators; you are free and untrammeled. Your goal is to improve everyone’s productivity by integrating applications you build into the manual quotidian processes. You cant be herded into the role you are paid for , you need something more inspiring and something that sets you apart. You have found that in shadow IT and you will never be bound by tech regulations. It takes a Promethean drive to do what you do and you will defiantly provide fire to humankind.
