February 4, 2026 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Expensive CPUs
February 4, 2026 at 5:07 pm
I read the article about the cost of software development approaching zero and realized the author was talking about one off solutions of a small and specialized nature. I am sure many of us remember shadow development where some employee created a spread sheet for some small and specialized problem. Then they share it with a co-worker who adds to it and shares it with the department and, what was a tool for one person to get a simple task accomplished becomes an important function for an entire department. Now they come to IT to improve performance or, worse, fix it when it breaks and the authors have left the department. IT needs to caution wholesale use of AI to write code that may be small at first but then grows and spreads and then IT has to fix it. I feel business users should do this kind of work for their own tasks because they can verify it is correct but they need to be careful how the share their "code."
February 4, 2026 at 6:43 pm
I read the article about the cost of software development approaching zero and realized the author was talking about one off solutions of a small and specialized nature. I am sure many of us remember shadow development where some employee created a spread sheet for some small and specialized problem. Then they share it with a co-worker who adds to it and shares it with the department and, what was a tool for one person to get a simple task accomplished becomes an important function for an entire department. Now they come to IT to improve performance or, worse, fix it when it breaks and the authors have left the department.
I've dealt with Shadow IT apps throughout my career. I'm writing a blog post for my employer on the benefits of Shadow IT.
All the things you hate about ShadowIT are justified....but.....ShadowIT produces the most honest statement of business requirements you will ever see. They may not be able to spell NFR, and they may be addressing symptoms rather than causes, but they are solving the problems they really have, rather than what gets filtered and embellished as it goes through the corporate bureaucracy.
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