Shadow IT

There are several sources of shadow IT:

• Solutions internally developed by a department (which Microsoft calls a corporate function team) for the department’s exclusive use (for example, legal or human resources)
• Solutions externally developed or purchased solutions
• Quick hacks developed by a citizen developer or adapted from a solution from another team, such as Excel macros, which are the most common.

Shadow IT often addresses legitimate line-of-business issues: an individual or business unit may be solving a problem too specialized or localized to ever make it to the top of the central IT organization’s work queue. For example, Microsoft’s first presence on the Internet (the first microsoft.com) began as a shadow IT project in a group that realized the importance of being on the Internet before the rest of the company. Other drivers include the following:

• A lack of trust between IT and the other teams, generally caused by existing IT solutions not addressing a team’s needs