I’ll start by saying that I have been on both sides of this issue. Organizations with business needs and a potential technology solution, often resort to building solutions internally to avoid the bureaucracy of approvals through formal channels. Once a solution is in place, that same organization seeks assistance from formal IT team. As a member of a formal IT team, I recently assumed solution management responsibility for a large application deployment that started within a business. My role included the responsibility of ensuring that all of the IT concerns were addressed including security, process and procedure development, contract negotiation, and license management. According to the business customer, the effort resulted in significant business value. In a perfect world, if the formal and “shadow” IT groups had worked together from the beginning, business value would have been delivered much early in the application life-cycle.

I do not see a resolution to this issue any time soon. The “use it or lose it” budget arrangements in many organizations focuses business managers on the short-term and protecting the headcount. In these arrangements, the overall organization is not as efficient because of sub-optimization within individual businesses and departments. Additionally, as long as IT is viewed as an expense rather than a revenue generator organizations will continue to keep the formal IT teams resources constrained prevent the ability add to the bottom-line.

After all, marketing is indeed about positioning, messaging, promotions et al, but more importantly it is the tool to help drive adoption and change. This is something that every CIO wished to do.

In my view, people are booked solid in meetings every working hour and have laptops open during those meetings to catch up on action items from prior ones! The lack of “white space” in calendars leads to a situation where everyone is overworked, lacks attention and getting overwhelmed with action items.

I’d appreciate thoughts on this as well.

Excellent post!

One’s perception of the IT service is often reduced to a phone conversation with a helpdesk service agent, first impression while using a new application just launched performance of mission critical applications, unable to print delivery tickets, response to disaster situation, stable desktop computer, etc. These are all related to Core IT.

One can define “Core” as the central, innermost, or most essential part of anything. This definition applies to IT most essential functions- one that you refer to as “Core IT”. “Core IT” is IT’s service delivery engine, its reason for being. It is where internal customers engage and experience IT.

Glenn