Digital democracy or IT anarchy? Gartner flags the low-code revolution
- Reference: 1699467311
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/11/08/gartner_shadow_it_low_code/
- Source link:
A [1]study by the consultant-cum-market-researcher has shown that 46 percent of EMEA CIOs are moving to a world where techies are no longer the sole proprietor of a company's digital assets.
The rise of no-code, low-code, and generative AI services has meant that what was once the domain of the IT team can now be delivered at a departmental level, though tech will be called upon if things go wrong.
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Readers with long memories might shudder at this, remembering the dark days of Visual Basic 3, Microsoft Access, and enthusiastic employees with not quite enough skill wreaking havoc on a company's infrastructure.
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Daniel Sanchez-Reina, VP Analyst at Gartner, told The Register this was a concern as digital delivery becomes ever more democratized within enterprises. "If you don't put a governance, good governance, in place, what you can get is chaos. And you can get even more shadow IT than the one that companies have."
According to Gartner's survey, which consisted of data gathered from 2,457 CIO respondents across 84 countries, 46 percent of CIOs are partnering with their CxO peers to co-own digital delivery on an enterprise-wide scale. The process has been dubbed the democratization of digital delivery, with the CIO acting as a franchiser of technology.
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Sanchez-Reina attributed this shift to the arrival of low-code and no-code services, with 66 percent of EMEA CIOs saying they had already or were planning to deploy the technology within the next two years. Unsurprisingly, 72 percent of CIOs surveyed reckoned the arrival of AI would be "game-changing" over the next three years, although only 29 percent were specific about generative AI. This suggests to us that not all CIOs necessarily understand what AI is in the current context.
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[7]Developing AI models or giant GPU clusters? Uncle Sam would like a word
[8]Samsung's results hint it's time to RAM some money into your memory budget
[9]The UK government? On the right track with its semiconductor strategy?
That said, the substantial spending continues to be on cybersecurity, with 81 percent of CIOs replying that they intend to increase investment in the area.
However, it is the franchising model and the democratization of digital delivery that marks a new trend. Sanchez-Reina told The Register that many organizations were unconsciously moving toward a franchise model as a side-effect of deployments. "The underlying reason is that CEOs are pushing IT departments to focus on strategic things."
This, in turn, means that tasks which once were the preserve of IT can be moved elsewhere thanks to new platforms and services. Sanchez-Reina said: "There are people in finance, for example, who are hiring – of course in agreement with the CIO – but they are hiring data scientists in an effort to provide analytical capabilities to the finance department. So it's something that in the past that was done by the IT departments."
Sanchez-Reina cautioned: "If a finance director hires a data scientist without informing, without reaching an agreement with the CIO, that's shadow IT. That's not democratization."
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And that way lies the potential for chaos as anyone who has had to deal with the pain of shadow IT can attest. Democratization of digital delivery is undoubtedly a good thing but it must be accompanied by robust governance. ®
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[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-11-08-gartner-survey-reveals-that-46-percent-of-emea-cios-are-shifting-to-co-owning-digital-leadership-with-their-cxo-peers
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/07/us_lawmakers_quantum/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/05/biden_ai_reporting_thresholds/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/01/samungs_results_point_to_memory/
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[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Been saying this for a good couple of years.... low code SaaS solutions like Power Apps, Power BI, etc, are just "MS Access in the cloud"
I'm all for makign the end users masters of their own destiny, but it has to be within guidelines/goverance frameworks.
IT Departments are often seen as slow, expensive and obstructive by other departments.
Some of that is due to good governance frameworks, but often its IT Dept not understanding the wider business and simple protectionism.
In most companies IT should be a service to the rest if the business, and good enough that shadow IT is less attractive.
re: IT Dept not understanding the wider business
> often its IT Dept not understanding the wider business and simple protectionism.
No, often it's senior management information hiding, getting you to do a half-ass job and then passing it onto an outside consultant (after giving you the day off). Then pretending he did it.
That's shadow IT
It's not new - back in the day, minicomputers (and then microcomputers...) were often a departmental response to a perceived or actual failure of provision by central organisations.
If you have a poorly-run company, riven by turf-wars (probably the majority of them...), any new technology whose acquisition isn't forbidden by existing policies is going to be a candidate for bolstering someone's power base. Cross-functional management is fairly rare, which is a shame as there's usually a genuine business requirement that's currently unmet and usually a better way of achieving it than business units going their own way.
Another way to look at it.
Tech is a broad church. IT depts. are good at core services, but maybe not so much use with specialist analysis.
IT would never complain or demand control if Sales employed a consultant and that consultant used a data analyst.
Now Sales may feel that the data analyst can work directly for them.
Not a good idea to run with the turf war school of corporate politics. Ends up toxic.
Time instead to ensure a better understanding of security prevails whenever tech is used, throughout the entity. Maybe should have been like that from the start.
Surprisingly correct Gartner view
Usually Gartner is an instant win of bullshit bingo, but this is quite on spot.
"even more shadow IT than the one that companies have" yep indeed. The usual "what does this server do? Nobody knows?" next level.
"This suggests to us that not all CIOs necessarily understand what AI is in the current context" - sad but true.
Firat up...
The thought of massed Excel 2.0 warriors makes me shudder, but I've seen enough this past few months to see where data is going and how to get money out of it and it needs skills from all over a business. IT will still provide the backbone but data is now "in yer face" commercial and needs completely different mentalities to fashion it. Even the name "data scientist" seems old in an environment where data value is subjective, fashionable and ever changing and you need experts from various fields to access it and fast.
Governance is the key and there are loads of tools out there now to control all that. This is going to be fun.