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Shadow information technology systems (SITS) coexist with formal enterprise systems in organisations. SITS pose risks but also increase flexibility of business units. Practice shows that SITS emerge, despite that Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) aims at controling all IT systems in an organization. Studies acknowledge this problem in general. However, they neither show the specific influencing areas of SITS nor provide approaches to address them. To close this gap, we use a literature review to analyse examples of practical SITS and their interference with EAM concerns. Thus, we find that they hinder especially transparency, reduction of EA complexity and governance. Research has focused on achieving transparency, governing the evolution of the EA but lacks strategies for reducing complexity. This study contributes to research and practice by uncovering the main influencing areas of SITS on EAM, as well as by laying a foundation for future research on this topic.
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.
Business units are increasingly able to fuel the transformation that digitalization demands of organizations. Thereby, they implement Shadow IT (SIT) to create flexible and innovative solutions. However, the individual implementation of SIT leads to high complexities and redundancies. Integration suggests itself to meet these challenges but can also eliminate the described benefits. In this emergent research, we develop propositions for a conceptual decision framework, that balances the benefits and drawbacks of an integration of SIT using a literature review as well as a multiple-case study. We thereby integrate the perspective of the overall organization as well as the specific business unit. We then pose six propositions regarding SIT integration that will serve to evaluate our conceptual framework in future research.
ERP systems integrate a major part of all business processes and organizations include them in their IT service management. Besides these formal systems, there are additional systems that are rather stand-alone and not included in the IT management tasks. These so-called ‘shadow systems’ also support business processes but hinder a high enterprise integration. Shadow systems appear during their explicit detection or during software maintenance projects such as enhancements or release changes of enterprise systems. Organizations then have to decide if and to what extent they integrate the identified shadow systems into their ERP systems. For this decision, organizations have to compare the capabilities of each identified shadow system with their ERP systems. Based on multiple-case studies, we provide a dependency approach to enable their comparison. We derive categories for different stages of the dependency and base insights into integration possibilities on these stages. Our results show that 64% of the shadow systems in our case studies are related to ERP systems. This means that they share parts or all of their data and/or functionality with the ERP system. Our research contributes to the field of integration as well as to the discussion about shadow systems.