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When Employees Use Software That IT Hasn’t Approved

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Re: When Employees Use Software That IT Hasn’t Approved

#51

Post by bt3 »

S_A_P wrote: post #21

I see this a lot in consulting. When a new CIO (or CEO or other C level) arrives, they want to make their mark with a digital transformation intiative. This usually just means that the new C level employee is coming into a medium to large business and would like to add a bullet point to their resume and get that new shiny object everyone is talking about. Tableau, Salesforce, Data lakes, blockchain, ERP, Identity Man…

> Nobody every gets fired for hiring Accenture/Deloitte/PwC. What usually happens in the non trivial niches is that these big shops sleeve the boutiques through them to get things done...

To provide a prospective as someone who works for a consulting firm like the ones you've mentioned... Hiring the "big" firms versus boutiques is a lot about a perception of risk, maintaining partnerships (procurement with new vendors is a nightmare everywhere), and leveraging experiences across other F500. For big implementations, think any ERP, our consulting teams can number 100+. Overkill? Probably, but there are few boutiques that have those kind of resources. And each of those 100 have more experience doing implementation work across a range of companies. It's a bit of a vicious cycle for boutiques where they will ultimately struggle to be competitive in these types of bids without seriously underpricing their services, which ends up meaning fewer resources or a less comprehensive scope.

As a side note, when projects go south, the company CIO isn't getting fired, but I've know many leaders (from the consulting side) getting let go for botching multi million dollar contracts.

Re: When Employees Use Software That IT Hasn’t Approved

#52

Post by philipodonnell »

enraged_camel wrote: post #41
philipodonnell wrote: post #36

> The CIO admitted that he had been approached and explained that he had informed the VP that IT already had a project with SAP to deliver what the VP needed. “Yes, but that won’t be ready for me to use for three years, and I need something today,” retorted the VP. The CIO was silent. Then the CEO asked the VP, “I’ve known you for ten years. You don’t seem like someone who would do something to harm the company. Why…

>>Any company doing a 3-year SAP implementation is a very large company. Not at all. I have a client with ~100 employees who are past year 2 of their Salesforce implementation because the director of technology keeps changing priorities and project requirements.

That's fair, but just using the time-frames in the article, 6 months had passed before the VP got caught and still had 3 years left on the implementation. I think a director of technology who take 3.5+ years to do a CRM implementation at a 100-person company... isn't doing a very good job. :-)

Re: When Employees Use Software That IT Hasn’t Approved

#53

Post by arkades »

philipodonnell wrote: post #36

> The CIO admitted that he had been approached and explained that he had informed the VP that IT already had a project with SAP to deliver what the VP needed. “Yes, but that won’t be ready for me to use for three years, and I need something today,” retorted the VP. The CIO was silent. Then the CEO asked the VP, “I’ve known you for ten years. You don’t seem like someone who would do something to harm the company. Why…

“My unit is bleeding money for lack of a CRM solution so cheap I can finance it on my personal credit card. Help?!”

“Cool, we will get back to you two years after you’re out of a jo- I mean, we will have a solution ready in three years.”

Yes. Someone should be tendering their resignation.

Re: When Employees Use Software That IT Hasn’t Approved

#55

Post by tvanantwerp »

The ideal IT team is one that proactively learns the needs of others in the business and works with them to solve problems. It's no wonder that so many companies end up with shadow IT when so many IT teams are just people who tell you "no" whenever you ask for something. Doing it right is harder in the near-term, but much easier in the long-term as you're not putting out so many fires or going to "disciplinary council" meetings.

Re: When Employees Use Software That IT Hasn’t Approved

#57

Post by beart »

rb808 wrote: post #47
maxxxxx wrote: post #22

This is exactly extremely common. In my company there is this constant battle about the devs having admin rights on their machines. We need admin rights to do our job. We have had dozens of meetings explaining the situation but IT can’t come up with a solution so the devs go around security because they have no alternative if they want to finish their work . Same with Dropbox. They block it but we have suppliers who…

I think most of the reasons for admin rights are no longer valid. Its easy to change user environment variables and lots of applications can be installed as a user. Why would you need admin rights? Dropbox/googledrive is a huge security hole that is definitely blocked at most companies I work at.

One example off the top of my head: It used to be (may still be) the case that you needed admin rights to install and run the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Sure, you might not need this to do your job, but IT is not really in a position to decide that. It could be that WSL greatly increases your productivity.

Re: When Employees Use Software That IT Hasn’t Approved

#58

Post by tvanantwerp »

rosege wrote: post #40
brixon wrote: post #25

Let's ignore the SaaS security issues for a second. When IT says "No" it's not like the area asking is going to go away and not try to solve their problem. Organizations are going to find ways to solve their issues and IT can either help from the beginning or help clean up the mess later. I try to take the stance of offering the right solution and a lot of the times a now solution at the same time. There is no saying…

In my last job I tried to handle this in a similar way. The issue we ran into though was that often these managers would not properly evaluate the software. They would get wowed by the sales guys and sign up for huge contracts without, sometimes, even checking with IT or testing other vendors.

Whenever I'm wearing my IT hat at work, a big part of it is being a detective looking for clues that somebody, somewhere, is about to do this. Then I can insert myself into that process. It would be preferable to be included in the beginning, but one must work within the reality of the situation.

Re: When Employees Use Software That IT Hasn’t Approved

#59

Post by eithed »

To me it reads like this - VP didn't care about the consequences of utilizing their solution and didn't care about IT; they simply wanted their stuff done, without acknowedgling prioratization of tasks.

The proper way this could have been resolved is by VP utilizing people's skills they've hired. Does this solution look good and will accomplish the task that was prioritized? Excellent! Pass it to IT to evaluate. If the task has specification - excellent, have somebody in IT look for a product that ticks all the boxes and let's choose it together.

Re: When Employees Use Software That IT Hasn’t Approved

#60

Post by S_A_P »

bt3 wrote: post #51
S_A_P wrote: post #21

I see this a lot in consulting. When a new CIO (or CEO or other C level) arrives, they want to make their mark with a digital transformation intiative. This usually just means that the new C level employee is coming into a medium to large business and would like to add a bullet point to their resume and get that new shiny object everyone is talking about. Tableau, Salesforce, Data lakes, blockchain, ERP, Identity Man…

> Nobody every gets fired for hiring Accenture/Deloitte/PwC. What usually happens in the non trivial niches is that these big shops sleeve the boutiques through them to get things done... To provide a prospective as someone who works for a consulting firm like the ones you've mentioned... Hiring the "big" firms versus boutiques is a lot about a perception of risk, maintaining partnerships (procurement with new vendor…

Agreed. There is a perceived risk with the F500 so they may spend more to do something than is required because they feel they have recourse with the big shops. There are some good teams of folks out there, but there are also some shops that are happy to send a dozen folks @250-300/hr that generate process maps in visio and power point slides instead of delivering/implementing a project. I have seen these big shops deliver in a timely manner and I have seen boondoggles that waste millions. I don't think they are by default "bad", I just think they are not necessarily the right choice in some circumstances, and the right option is to hire the boutique niche firm that specializes in what they need. This lack of awareness is exactly what the article brings to light. CIO shoots down VP who needs timely solution for long protracted big rock implementation.
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