Shadow it – Steroids for Innovation

Abstract

Shadow IT is relatively new and emerging phenomenon which is bringing number of concerns and risks to the organizational security. Past literature has mostly explored the “negative” effects of the Shadow IT phenomenon, including, for example, the security aspect where Shadow systems are said to undermine the official systems and endanger organizational data flows. But, they are also said to increase innovation. However, the current literature does not provide any evidence of a possible innovation increase. We used three methods to understand if Shadow IT can be an important source of innovation for firms: 1) Single case study with international firm that adopted Shadow IT; 2) Interviews with 15 IT executives and 3) Focus group using twitter as enabling tool to interact with 65 IT professionals. Our study reveals that Shadow IT can be an important source of Innovation for organizations. Finally, our research brings new theoretical contributions for researchers and important insights for practitioners. We also provide limitation and future directions for research.

Keywords: Shadow IT, software, organizational IT, shadow systems, information security, innovation