Shadow IT

Excerpt

Innovative information technology (IT) applications and services offered in the cloud, easily accessible via the Internet, either for free or on a flexible pay-per-use basis are increasing rapidly. Employees can use them on organizational and/or personal laptops, tablets, and smartphones to work more efficiently from home or when travelling, or to collaborate conveniently across distance and time zones. While these benefits may fuel today’s digital transformation, they also attract end users or lines of business to turn to such IT offerings on demand without having the organization’s approval to act (e.g., Györy et al. 2012; Urbach and Ahlemann 2016). This trend boosts shadow IT which is hardware, software, or services built, introduced, and/or used for the job without explicit approval or even knowledge of the organization. Recent studies show that 80% of end users and 90% of functional managers deploy shadow IT and opt, for example, to quickly, although unofficially, upload a file to Dropbox or Google Drive instead of applying for an official remote VPN link (Segal 2016). Shadow IT is thus used to boost job and business performance (e.g., Haag et al. 2015). …