Shadow-IT and the University: a mixed relationship

This post (in German language) by my colleague Prof. Steffi Haag beautifully illustrates the opportunities that the use of shadow IT can also have in the university.

I often think of shadow IT as reinventing the wheel: chairs running their own Exchange servers, NAS boxes stored under the desk in the secretary's office, meeting rooms converted into PC pools. I don't raise my eyebrows at the expenditure of material resources; each professorship should know for itself what it spends its budget on. The difficult part is usually the human decisions behind it. First of all, investing in shadow IT requires a professor who is convinced that the central IT services of the university do not meet her demands for IT services. Steffi Haag writes about this mindset:

However, our research of more than 85 shadow IT cases shows that the use of shadow IT is often rooted in such restrictive corporate practices themselves. Specifically, when employees face an impasse that prevents them from achieving their goals. Whether it's because they fall on deaf ears in their company when it comes to new digital solutions; whether it's because the use of new digital technologies is limited, such as tablets whose use is restricted to certain apps; or whether it's because companies cannot fully meet the needs of their employees, for example, due to legal requirements such as the GDPR. Whatever creates the sensation of an impasse, shadow IT offers employees a way out.

This kind of sensibility seems to be even more widely represented in the university than elsewhere. This is in the nature of things: precisely the activity in research has, by definition, to do with the search for a way out of a dead end! No wonder that professors also apply this to their IT problems. Many interesting IT solutions have been brought to my attention by individual chairs trying them out -- be it edTech tools or electronic lab books. I am happy to discuss this with professors in the designated presidential or senate committee, have these tools demonstrated to us, and many a time also make procurement decisions.

Sensitivity, however, all too often turns into incomprehension when the commission does not want to follow the idea and the proposer does not find this reasonable. The above list of reasons why a company (or a university) does not use a great new solution does not mention one central point: the lack of budget and personnel. Every Euro we spend on IT does not go directly into research (staff positions) or teaching. Every Euro spent on shadow IT takes away one Euro from publication fees, travel, and human resources. Every staff hour spent on Exchange server maintenance takes a PhD student further away from her dissertation.

Despite all the opportunities, for reasons of efficiency, principally I have to take a side against shadow IT in the university.

Translated with DeepL