By Dick Stark

For the past twelve years, RightStar has sold ITSM solutions primarily into centralized IT Departments. These organizations have come to rely on ITSM toolsets such as Remedy, Remdyforce, or FootPrints to deliver technology services in a centralized approach. Occasionally, we sell into other departments like HR or Facilities, but only after approval from IT and in response to a request for application consolidation using an ITSM tool as the centerpiece.

With the advent of SaaS and other cloud based services, users are discovering the ease of, for example, “spinning” up a server, and testing and purchasing an application with no IT department involvement whatsoever. As a result, IT is quickly becoming a service broker, rather than a service provider. Rogue IT is here to stay.

In a recent ComputerWorld article, a survey of IT professionals said rogue IT projects are a fact of life in corporate America:

• 90% said there are computer projects under way in their companies that don’t involve the IT department.
• 58% said their companies have policies that bar significant IT projects from being undertaken without IT department approval or control.
• 86% said IT products are being installed in their companies without the authorization or support of the IT department.

What about rogue ITSM? Of course outsourcers and MSP’s offer ITSM services such as L1 and L2 support, but the decision to outsource the service desk is typically made at the CIO level. Rogue ITSM is not yet realistic. Google and Microsoft Outlook are not yet very good substitutes for knowledge and incident management, and Amazon may not be the ideal substitute for a service catalog. These options may work well for individuals in a very small organization, but mid to large organization must continue to rely on ITSM processes and toolsets. This means the future of ITSM continues to look bright.

What about rogue IT for DevOps? As an Atlassian partner, we’ve discovered that rogue IT is common place in software development organizations, and especially with Atlassian and their family of DevOps, coding, collaboration, and tracking software tools. A software development team may realize that they require agile tools and processes in order to remain competitive. By swiping a credit card on the Atlassian website, they are “off to the races.” I recently talked to a VP of IT and he admitted that the company’s software development organization made a sizeable investment in Atlassian, but kept him totally in the dark. Because of social media and ease of implementation, Atlassian has grown to more than $200M in software sales. That is a lot of credit card swipes.

While rogue IT Atlassian users are growing like wildfire, IT is starting to take notice, especially in regard to:

Security. With the recent security breach headlines, people recognize that security is important and IT is the place go.

Collaboration. Collaboration with IT means successful projects. IT can assist with things like architecture, process design, and data redundancy.

The good news is RightStar is well positioned to assist both central IT and rogue IT with consolidation of their Atlassian processes and systems.