Professionals like do-it-yourselfers. Undoing a bad job and replacing it with a good one is, after all, more profitable than starting from scratch.
Not that all do-it-yourselfers are hopeless (or, for that matter, hapless). The trick for those of us who engage in DIY is knowing when a new project is a reasonable stretch and when our daydreams of the perfect installation crash into a needed skill that, like soldering copper pipes with a blowtorch, is just too terrifying to contemplate.
Add to that an entire industry devoted to making DIY projects less daunting — a recent successful adventure with digital door locks comes to mind — and the equation becomes more interesting.
This being KJR we aren’t, of course, talking about home improvement. We’re talking about office improvement through the deployment of so-called “shadow IT.” One difference … no analogy is perfect, after all … is that unlike home improvement failures, where professional plumbers, electricians, and dry wallers are happy to get paid for fixing someone else’s mistakes, IT professionals aren’t usually too thrilled when they’re called in to deal with DIY software gone wrong.
Which isn’t to say trying to stomp out shadow IT is a good idea, any more than trying to stomp out DIY home improvement would be a good idea.
As is so often the case, good policy starts by recognizing that different groups have different priorities.
With home improvement, the goals for a typical DIYer (aka me) are, in descending order of importance, (1) saving money; (2) getting a warm feeling of accomplishment; and (3) receiving admiring compliments from friends and family.
Home improvement professionals, in contrast, most likely want: (1) profitable income; (2) repeat business; and (3) referrals.
Software DIY? My informal experience tells me the DIYer’s goals are quite parallel — to get: (1) the benefits of automation sooner rather than later; (2) a solution that’s tailored to fit the situation without having to explain what’s needed in detail; (3) admiring compliments and all that.
IT’s goals when implementing software are a bit different. In particular, IT wants (1) easy and maintainable integration; (2) solutions and the platforms they’re built on that aren’t going to vanish from the technology marketplace, provided by (3) vendors that also aren’t going to vanish from the landscape; and, oh, by the way, that (4) do enough of what business requesters want that they can live with the gap, without demanding a lot of tailoring or customization.
That’s quite a mismatch. But the mismatch between DIY IT and IT-led implementations isn’t a problem. It’s a place to start.
Bob’s last word: That two groups have different goals isn’t an insurmountable problem … unless, that is, the groups have no interest in achieving any goals other than their own.
What we typically have is mutual distrust and fault-finding. What we need is a methodology that accommodates both IT’s and business DIYers goals.
Bob’s sales pitch: It doesn’t address this issue specifically, but I think you’ll find chapters 4 and 5 of the KJR Manifesto helpful, and not just for dealing with shadow IT.
They’ll help any time addressing two groups’ distrust is where you need to start.
My experience is that it is usually easier better faster cheaper to start over and do it right than to bleep around trying to fix a POS. YMMV
This column is as relevant now as it would have been if it had been written 10, 20, 30, maybe even 40 years ago! Although 40 years ago,integration, interoperability, and security weren’t particularly significant concerns of the central IT group…
Your goals for DIYers, whether in home improvement or shadow IT, are absolutely valid, but perhaps miss one that is valuable for both the DIYer and the professional: education. The DIYer just by trying to solve a problem will learn by experience some of what the professional cares so much about: integration, maintainability, user experience, the extant corporate environment, etc. They will be able to communicate better with the professional staff in the future and they will be better able to distinguish real concerns from fluff and unreasonable project padding when presented with such. The experienced DIYer need not be much inferior to the professional in knowledge and often acts as the user respresentative on IT projects, able to speed and smooth the communication of user wants and needs into IT speak.
Some of these people are better thought of as an intermediate group of people with some overlap to “power users”. They may have started out as DIYers, but achieve IT-worthy knowledge and experience. They can produce excellent IT solutions but still live outside IT departments. One thinks of people who began or continue their careers studying electric fish, molecules, machines, or markets, and who develop software and solutions for themselves or small groups of people. They can combine the best of the cost and maintainability concerns, often by limiting themselves to projects where integration with the corprorate environment is not a signifcant factor.
I’m in the middle of a big consolidation of IT and we’re discovering all sorts of semi-DIY projects. They were put together by someone with IT skills but not really designed necessarily and just stuck on the spare disks on current production servers.
They work good enough but nowadays, we have a new problem. The current consolidation of IT is because we’re putting everything in the cloud. (off-topic. Doesn’t “Azure” sound like a bad name for cloud company?)
The cloud works for everything as long as you have a credit card.
The reason these backdoor systems exist where they do is because of lack of budget as much as anything else. (I’m sure the lack of budget follows the lack of management interest).
There isn’t any spare space on a cloud server, not when you pay by the bit.
We’ll still end up with DIY cloud applications but at least the folks will be spending their own money so that should force someone to pay more attention so overall, there will probably be a small improvement in the design of the DIY systems.
Hello Bob,
Just wanted to wish you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving.
Caroline.
Thank you. And let me wish you the very best as well. Stay safe.