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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

5. Talk to Users

Pop quiz: Do you remember every form you signed when you joined your company and what policies you agreed to follow? Most users don't know either. That's why relying on written policies is the worst way to influence user behaviour. There are some shadow IT systems that CIOs absolutely have to shut down or prevent from being installed in the first place. But counting on a memo to make that happen is a mistake.

"I don't like to have a lot of policies," says Wilcox. "There are certain ones you have to have to CYA, but we don't have tons and tons of them." For example Millipore lets employees store personal information on their work computers, and there's a written policy that says the company owns any information on a company laptop. But usually Wilcox "relies on verbal communication with the users, starting at the top.

"Most managers, when you talk to them, they know you can't do things one off," he says. "In this day and age, protection and privacy of info is vitally important. And they know that." In order to make them understand what IT is going through he tries to put policies into terms that they will understand, drawing on similarities between what the company goes through and what users experience in their own life with their own data.

"Are you sure that [the shadow IT project] is trusted?" Wilcox asks users. "Would you be concerned if it was your personal information?" It's also possible to draw on past experience. "We've had just enough instances where something happened that wasn't serious but could have been," says Lake County's Holladay.

His office has had to deal with everything from viruses that almost shut the office down, to users who didn't lock their computers, potentially allowing anyone to access hugely secure court records. In each case the users knew they had done something wrong and that it could have been much worse. Call it the guilt approach, but Holladay says that people listen when you explain the risks of a shadow IT system in terms that they can relate to personally.

In one case Holladay encouraged people to install their own screen savers, part of his strategy to create a friendlier workplace. But people started sharing them with each other, which was a copyright violation. Holladay applied his standard test — how would he feel if the local newspaper wrote a story about what was going on? He imagined the headline, "Copyright Violations Run Rampant at County Clerk's Office", and used it as the rationale to explain why he had to outlaw the practice.

The ability to communicate well is the key to keeping dangerous shadow IT projects from popping up. The responsibility doesn't fall just to the CIO but to the entire IT staff. And it requires a conscious effort. "Any time one of my staff is out at a desktop they are communicating our policy," says the Southern Ute's Young. "That is the form of communication that stays forefront in the mind of the user and my staff."

That interaction is a chance to advertise corporate IT — not just the services it provides, but also its openness to new ideas. And at the end of the day, whether IT is perceived as open and helpful could be the difference between having to compete with a shadow IT department or not.

Clark believes the defining characteristic of a company that has a shadow IT problem "is if the users have stopped bringing ideas to you. Do they just assume you will say no? In any good company users are going to be bringing ideas constantly."

More About Shadow IT To learn more about consumer IT in the workplace, read "Users Who Know Too Much and the CIOs Who Fear Them"

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