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Rogue projects happen between IT groups, too. Stuart Williams, a former consultant to CIOs at Magenic Technologies Inc., a Minneapolis-based consulting firm, recalls one instance where IT at a large financial services company set up a Web-based quote service without telling corporate IT. Unfortunately, the department forgot to secure the site against hackers.
As Williams tells it, a "script kiddie" discovered the unsecured Web service and wrote a script that queued thousands of transactions just to see if he could wreck it (which he did). The company's back-end servers were offline for six hours during prime time. The cost: hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Williams. When it was discovered that the department misled corporate IT about the project, heads rolled, he says.
In theory, good IT governance should help. If a procurement office won't pay for IT equipment unless the CIO has signed off on the purchase, that should nip rogue activity in the bud. But analysts say anecdotal evidence paints a different picture: As the price of technology has decreased, rogue IT has proliferated. Ten years ago, it was fairly difficult to buy a PC without anyone noticing. Now, even a low-level manager can use his company credit card to set up a stealth mini-network.
Too much governance also encourages rogue IT, says Marc Cecere, a Forrester Research Inc. principal analyst and vice president. Take project initiation processes. Ideally, they turn an idea into a working IT project efficiently. But Cecere has seen cases where it takes months to work out the process, let alone start the project. "The whole process becomes so onerous that essentially no one even starts the process because they know it will take forever. So they go to the person sitting next to them," Cecere says.
Other times, CIOs who are flat-out oppressive drive users to rebellious behavior. Cecere has seen CIOs forbid employees from hooking up to a hotel network while traveling. "They'll say, 'We want you to use only our [secure Internet access] software,' which slows systems down to a crawl, or 'We want you to use a dial-up facility,'" Cecere says. "People say, 'Well, that's nuts. We're not going to do that.' And they'll figure out ways around corporate dictates."
Magenic's Williams puts it more bluntly: "Business people need to get things done. Their salaries are tied to their performance. When you stand between them and [their] dollars, they will lash out and operate how they please."
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