• JimS-Indy (8/28/2012)


    I am a shadow IT warrior. Unlike most, I have a long (30+yrs) background and high respect for the principles that undergird IT. I exist (and am well-paid for it...) for exactly the reason you stated. The IT department take weeks or months to simply approve studying a new project, however small or large, then many more months until the project reaches the top of the list (if ever...) and then it is either no longer needed or business conditions have changed and the original URS no longer applies. If the project is undertaken, it suffers seriously from the IT group's distance away from the site, and its complete lack of business skills.

    Having said that, I routinely say to my client: "You should ask your IT folks to do that for you. It's not appropriate for me to do it." They always respond by saying I will be tasked to do it.

    Fortunately for them, I follow strict IT guidelines, back up my work, create appropriate security and recoverability, and ensure that my clients are well-trained and could transfer my work to their IT group with a minimum of difficulty if I were to die or become otherwise unable to serve them. That's my responsibility, I bill them for it, and they pay the bill.

    I am sad, though, that we're in this position. Few "shadow warriors" are as careful and experienced as I am.

    Jim

    I've spent the last four years as a shadow warrior. There are several reason for this. The first is a general sentiment from "the powers that be" that IT is a cost center, not a profit center, and therefore, the less staffing IT has, the better. This has lead to the usual problems of an overworked IT staff not being able to respond in a timely fashion to user requests. (That's not always bad, as some user requests are just plain silly. I've always thought IT should act like a vendor to other departments, each with it's own budget for IT services. When IT services are "free", there is, ceteris paribus, greater demand for it. There is no check regarding economic value of the IT requests before they are made.)

    The result, the second reason for my shadow warriorhood, is the unwillingness of some managers to let the aforementioned short-sited management views cripple their department's productivity. So, for example, my old boss created a non-IT position for me, with the understanding that I would spend about half my time (ended up being more lke 80%) on IT work: screen development for the MRP system, stored procedures, ad hoc queries that often evolved into regular Crystal Reports, macros, spiffy spreadsheets, (because we dare not bring in Access! The powers that be would rather see small databases stored in spreadsheets!), et al.

    Fortunately, I am a formally trained computer scientist. Many of the ad hoc homegrown solutions I encounter are done in a sloppy manner, by well-intentioned amatuers. The best interests of the enterprise are served when anything bigger that a onetime use spreadsheet is done by someone that knows what they are doing. Until senior management changes their opinion of the proper application of IT resources to the enterprise, there will be a shadow warriors among us.

    [font="Verdana"]Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you.[/font]
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