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The Declaration of Interdependence

The Declaration of Interdependence

The world has changed. You can’t deny employees the freedom to use consumer applications at work. Here’s how to live with and profit from them

2. Know the Business Case

One of the challenges with shadow IT systems is that they work great for the users — they are usually the most customized solution a user could find. But an application that works for an individual user may not work for the company. A shadow system may not scale, it may open up a hole in the firewall or it may conflict with another system the company runs. Corporate IT departments normally test for compatibility with the existing environment and calculate operating costs before deploying any new system; for these reasons, nominally free software might still cost thousands of dollars to deploy.

"Free isn't always free," explains Dwain Wilcox, vice president of information technology for Millipore, a $US1.2 billion biotech company. "Even though it is free and enhances productivity, we have to go find out what the hidden issues are." This is why Drees at first didn't let people bring their own cameras to work. "Supporting one person with one camera is not a problem," says Clark. "Supporting 200 people with 200 cameras is."

Finding a product that works as a corporate standard can solve such problems, however. "With one standard [application], supporting 200 cameras is suddenly doable again," says Clark about his company's decision to deploy Google's Picasa. Like Clark and Wilcox, 30 percent of the respondents to the CIO survey study the business case for a consumer IT project to see if it can be mainstreamed.

Identifying a scalable version of a consumer technology to test and deploy across the enterprise is no different from what CIOs have always done with e-mail and other enterprise systems. "We standardized on BlackBerrys early on," says Wilcox, the Millipore VP, whose employees use the devices not only for e-mail but also to access corporate data on Salesforce.com.

Millipore used to support a variety of devices. "We were finding that setting up new users took a really long time, an hour or two," says Wilcox. "Imagine doing that across the enterprise — it increases the amount of work for IT exponentially." But once the company adopted BlackBerrys for everyone, the work became manageable, because the IT department had to learn only once how to set up a new user.

There were trade-offs, of course. The people who used Treos or Windows devices were upset that they had to switch. But at the end of the day there wasn't really anything that they could do on those devices that they couldn't do with a BlackBerry. Plus, Wilcox was able to sweeten the deal with access to Salesforce.com. So in the end, Wilcox says, they came around. Again, it was a good compromise.

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