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As the trend toward functional business purchases grows, the study warned that a potential problem area for IT going forward would be the corresponding growth in shadow IT. The study found that 17 percent of technology spending came from shadow IT, opening up possibilities for security problems, blind spots and redundant spending. The main areas where the shadow IT occurs were in legal, marketing, product management and the manufacturing supply chain.
"Make sure you understand what is truly holding your IT organization back. Don't get distracted by secondary drivers of why the business avoids working with IT, especially if those secondary drivers are easier to address than the primary cause," IDC said. "Our study shows business executives think IT organizations need to spend more time learning the business processes and building relationships with the key business stakeholders -- two root causes not so quickly addressed. Developing an action plan to address these two issues is likely the starting point for reducing shadow IT in your organization and becoming a more valuable partner to the business."
There are two recommended approaches to solving the growing problem, according to the study. First, IT can collaborate with the finance department to "hunt down" the shadow IT and implement corporate policies to prevent further growth. The second recommended approach is to discover the root cause of the issue and why employees preferred to implement IT without consultation.
The bottom line is that IT needs to make sure it is critical to business, business executives told the researchers of the study. Fifty-seven percent of business executives said that IT needs to make itself more important to business functions by learning more of the processes outside of the technical aspects. In fact, 51 percent of business executives said they wished IT would bring them new ideas on how to improve the functionality of their business.
"To succeed in this world of technology-imbued business processes, IT organizations need to work closely with the business to identify where technology can provide the business with a competitive advantage," said IDC's Whalen in the study.
PUBLISHED Oct. 4, 2013
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