Conceptualizing Shadow IT Integration Drawbacks from a Systemic Viewpoint

Abstract

Business units are increasingly able to fuel the transformation that digitalization demands of organizations. Thereby, they can implement Shadow IT (SIT) without involving a central IT department to create flexible and innovative solutions. Self-reinforcing effects lead to an intertwinement of SIT with the organization. As a result, high complexities, redundancies, and sometimes even lock-ins occur. IT Integration suggests itself to meet these challenges. However, it can also eliminate the benefits that SIT presents. To help organizations in this area of conflict, we are conducting a literature review including a systematic search and an analysis from a systemic viewpoint using path dependency and switching costs. Our resulting conceptual framework for SIT integration drawbacks classifies the drawbacks into three dimensions. The first dimension consists of switching costs that account for the financial, procedural, and emotional drawbacks and the drawbacks from a loss of SIT benefits. The second dimension includes organizational, technical, and level-spanning criteria. The third dimension classifies the drawbacks into the global level, the local level, and the interaction between them. We contribute to the scientific discussion by introducing a systemic viewpoint to the research on shadow IT. Practitioners can use the presented criteria to collect evidence to reach an IT integration decision.

A Benefit Dependency Network for Shadow Information Technology Adoption, Based on Practitioners’ Viewpoints

“…SIT is a socio-technical phenomenon [21], and whether it is good, bad or even neutral is not clear yet, as opinions diverge on what really happens in organizations, on how to handle it or if it is even worth the risk, as many times, in practice, the situation is often more complicated [12]. Aspects such as company data safety being more important than employee satisfaction or productivity, and profit being the main focus no matter the downside make the behavioral consequences of utilizing shadow IT ambiguous [37], as employees justify their use on the grounds of better productivity; however, on the other hand, management and IT departments spend a lot of time, effort and capital to ensure that the company system stays up-to-date and protected.…”

“…However, before anything is implemented, it is very important to take a step back and to try to understand the extent, the reach and the opinions on these solutions-as shown in Table 1. x - (Behrens, 2009) [20] x -(Eckartz, Daneva, Wieringa and van Hillegersberg, 2009) [30] x -(Rentrop and Zimmermann, 2012) [31] x -(Györy, Cleven, Uebernickel and Brenner, 2012) [4] x -(Tambo and Baekgaard, 2013) [32] x -(Silic and Back, 2014) [19] x -(Kretzer and Maedche, 2014) [33] x -(Haag and Eckhardt, 2015) [28] x -(G. L. Mallmann, Maçada and Oliveira, 2016) [17] x -(Lund-Jensen, Azaria, Permien, Sawari and Baekgaard, 2016) [34] x -(Silic, 2015) [18] x -(Furstenau, Rothe and Sandner, 2017) [15] x -(Silic, Barlow, and Back, 2017) [5] x -(Walterbusch, Fietz and Teuteberg, 2017) [23] x -(Haag and Eckhardt, 2017) [1] x -(Huber, Zimmermann, Rentrop and Felden, 2017) [16] x -(Steinhueser, Waizenegger, Vodanovich and Richter, 2017) [35] x -(Mallmann, Maçada and Eckhardt, 2018) [36] x - x -(Huber, Zimmermann, Rentrop, and Felden, 2018) [21] x -(Magunduni and Chigona, 2018) [14] x -(Klotz, Kopper, Westner and Strahringer, 2019) [7] x -(Haag, Eckhardt and Schwarz, 2019) [11] x -(Haag, Eckhardt and Schwarz, 2019) [37] x -(Mallmann and Maçada, 2021) [12] x -(Richter, Waizenegger, Steinhueser and Richter, 2019) [13] x -(Sillic, 2019) [9] x -(Raković, 2020) [8] x -(Fürstenau, Rothe and Sandner, 2021) [38] x -(Jarrahi, Reynolds and Eshraghi, 2021) [39] x -(Kopper, Westner and Strahringer, 2020) [10] x -So far, SIT has received limited scholarly attention, and that might be one of the reasons why it is a widespread challenge across IT departments. Companies such as Accenture have been saying that the "golden ages" of SIT are ahead of us, as this new generation...…”

“…Some authors suggest that SIT offers an effective and efficient way for users to cope with the insufficiencies of the formal systems and can be used as a solution to an existing problem with the implemented systems [4,5,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. On the other hand, the negative side of SIT has also been pointed out as it creates the complex challenges experienced by many organizations and IT departments [5,7,8,11,13,[21][22][23]. In fact, SIT is widely considered as one of the biggest challenges for the chief information officers (CIOs) and the IT departments [5] of organizations due to the risks it brings.…”

Causing factors, outcomes, and governance of Shadow IT and business-managed IT: a systematic literature review

“…Three potential governance allocations exist on a spectrum of governance responsibility being allocated to the IT organization (IG3) or the BU (IG5). The first potential governance allocation is governance transfer to the IT organization [6,8,95], such as for instances with high criticality [8,54,98], crucial security concerns [50], or for instances, for which the company-wide view is in favor of the integration with the IT organization [124], or when maintenance is too burdensome for the BU [57].…”

Leaving the Shadow: A Configurational Approach to Explain Post-identification Outcomes of Shadow IT Systems

“…For example, a system's technical basis may no longer be updated by the vendor and self-development may be too costly. Further technological challenges can relate to non-performant or complex integration (Huber et al 2018). For example, uploading data to other systems may be too complex and a simple fix may not be in sight.…”