Whether Hillary Clinton ends up being elected the next U.S. president, she deserves to be nominated for “Shadow IT Employee of the Year.” Her actions in setting up a home network and using it to conduct official State Department business has single handedly focused the spotlight on a growing fact of life in the workplace: users employing whatever applications they can get their hands on to conduct work-related communications, outside “approved” technology managed by the official IT staff within a public or private institution.
The rapidly emerging existence of “shadow IT” poses potentially vexing issues from an information governance perspective, as it highlights the tension between the legitimate needs for institutional control of data, versus the genuine desire to empower users to efficiently conduct business using all available services, channels and apps.
