Over the many years I have spent in IT I have been pleased to see a growing professionalism in central IT in many medium to large companies. They are now taking a very serious attitude to controlling the environment, have proper standards based IT management, perhaps exploiting the ITIL standards, and embrace good methodologies and implement change management all critical systems. In some case companies are out sourcing and/or of-shoring a lot of more routine systems and management which again means that strict disciplines are required when managing the IT estate. This is of course all good stuff, however I am increasingly seeing an interesting effect deep within business departments. I call the effect Stealth IT – sometimes IT departments call it end user computing – in the sense that there are certain tools like Excel and Access that business users are free to use as they wish. The disciplines that are shaping the central IT departments are at the same time slowing developments down in most cases and causing frustrated end users to make up their own systems using whatever tools come to hand – like Access, Excel or Lotus Notes. Some departments will hire their own developers or technical staff or leave it to enthusiastic amateurs. At first this can look like a really quick and easy solution to a business problem – Central IT is perceived to be too slow and unresponsive for the business and they prefer to use a local resource under their direct control. The problem is that it means large corporates may have key areas of their business or key functions running on ridiculously large spreadsheets or “Access” databases that IT maybe unaware of and that are unsupported – especially when the local resource (often a contractor) moves on. Central IT only hear about these when something goes badly wrong or there is an audit of some sort – by which time the damage is done. I often wonder if the senior management of these companies are aware of the risks that these departments are running – especially with respect to compliance and any aspect of disaster recovery.
So can anything be done?
Well on the organisational front I have seen some progress against these renegades by the introduction of rapid response teams – where IT have a small team of people who can go in to a department and resolve small requirements without the over head of too much documentation and time. The advantage is that central IT can keep some control and are aware of what is going on across a company - which if nothing else avoids the re-invention of wheels and wasting of time and effort. The down side is there are still these pockets of applications sitting on local machines or departmental servers that are effectively unmanaged. There may well still be hundreds of uncontrolled spreadsheets roaming around!
Another encouraging sign on the horizon comes with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) with both its now much more powerful “list” capabilities (think simple databases) and the concept of server based Excel. Excel Services (part of 2007 Office System), allows the storing sharing and running of Excel workbooks server-side. It has two main interfaces, a DHTML browser interface (does not require Excel on the client), so that you can view/calculate shared sheets through the browser and a Web Services programmatic interface to allow developers access to both the logic and the data in a workbook. If this is used correctly this can remove the need for email circulation of sheets, and the re-invention of the spreadsheet wheel that is far too common in large organisations. This also looks scalable and can allow off loading of complex spreadsheet calculations to a server.
This allows for much more centralising and sharing of good "Excel" or SharePoint “List” based solutions. It still needs backing up by some central IT support squads, who can share best practice and ways of working but it is a step in the right direction and a feature of MOSS that way be over looked. Some may say this is just an extension of big brother computing – but when trying to keep control, cut costs and especially with an eye to compliance maybe big brother knows best sometimes!