Enabling shadow IT: Why fight it? Embrace it!

Today, our CEO, Scott Sandschafer, presented at the Gartner IT Symposium in Barcelona.  

His presentation, “Enabling business (shadow) IT: Why fight it? Embrace it,” had a full house and explored how IT can evolve from a supporting role to a strategic driver of business innovation, more specifically empowering independent innovation by business units, ensuring speed without compromising governance, compliance, and security. 

With over a decade of technology leadership experience, including roles such as global CIO of Novartis, Scott has been instrumental in driving transformative change. Recognized for his influence in technology leadership circles, Scott champions the integration of digital technology into business models, contributing to Calibo’s innovative edge. 

This is a summary of his presentation (we have adapted it to fit this blog format). 

Becoming the CIO of Chrysler 

Travel back with us to November 12, 2009, as Scott recounts a pivotal moment in his career. Sitting in the office of the visionary Sergio Marchionne, then CEO of Fiat Automobiles, Scott was faced with a defining question. Marchionne had just taken the helm of bankrupt Chrysler and was about to appoint a new CIO to the $40 billion automotive giant. 

As Scott recalls,

“At the age of 35, I faced his critical question: was I ready to step up as the CIO of Chrysler, a $40 billion automotive behemoth? And of course, I said ‘yes’. I wasn’t ready, but I said ‘yes’. And he offered me the job.” 

He was driven by the challenge to align IT more closely with the business’s evolving needs and dismantle the shadow IT lurking in the corners. It was a mandate that seemed straightforward in a pre-cloud, pre-digital era, where AI was yet to shape the landscape. 

Fast-forward to today’s landscape, the challenges IT leaders face have transformed drastically. 

Navigating modern IT challenges: bridging innovation and compliance 

Today, CIOs and IT leaders confront numerous challenges, such as continuously evolving technology, rising costs, and maintaining compliance and security while ensuring business needs are met effectively.  

As Scott says: “Obviously, the risk and the compliance, as well as the security challenges that you might have, are always concerns of the CIO or people in the technology organization”. 

The explosion of technology—particularly in software development and data creation—requires innovative solutions that align IT with business objectives.  

Reflecting on his experiences at Novartis, where he served as Global CIO from 2015 to 2020, Scott observed a tech-savvy workforce eager to embrace digital transformation. 

He recalls: “When I was there, the workforce was much more technology savvy, data-savvy, and technology-centric. Their ability to engage, their willingness, and their sponsorship of our CEO and executive teams encouraged us to do everything you possibly could do around digital and data.” 

However, the implementation of controls for compliance often felt impossible, bogged down by internal bureaucracies.  

“Not only [regarding] the technology complexity, but we also had our own internal bureaucracy. Oh, my goodness, we need to get finance approvals. We need to make sure that we have the architects review, the security review. And by that point in time, the business requirements have already changed,” he said. 

The slow, siloed processes were a major roadblock for innovation, as business requirements evolved faster than IT’s ability to deliver. 

He continues: “I’ve now learned, as the CEO of Calibo over the last four years, as well as my experiences at Chrysler and Novartis, that you shouldn’t fight anymore. You need to embrace it, and you need to enable it.” 

“As the CEO of Calibo, I have embraced a new vision: to bridge this gap by forging a digital ecosystem that empowers business units through technology enablement. This approach hinges on embracing, rather than resisting, tech capabilities within business units. Instead of a monolithic IT handling everything, it’s about decentralizing tech talent and allowing software developers, data scientists, and engineers direct engagement with business challenges.” 

This approach involves fostering a digital ecosystem with solid guardrails, allowing flexibility for business units to harness technology effectively.  

The key to improving the developer experience  

At the Gartner Symposium, discussions on platform engineering and introducing internal developer portals highlighted the importance of enhancing the developer experience and promoting self-service capabilities. These innovations are crucial for reducing organizational friction, allowing teams to operate with greater independence and speed. 

Scott emphasizes: “[What’s] important is how you can improve the experience for your own internal developers. You probably have internal developers, data scientists, and data engineers in your respective organizations. But again, you’re fighting and potentially having people who are challenging you or have these capabilities within the business. How much frustration is in your organizations where people have to create tickets and wait for people to do things on their behalf? It’s so painful. The key thing is improving their experience.” 

“Ultimately, having an internal developer portal that allows a developer to do the things that they want – when they’re needed – based on the guardrails [set up] and the engineering platform capabilities that you’ve already established.” 

An internal developer portal empowers developers by allowing them to independently manage their tasks within predefined guardrails and engineering platform capabilities. This system streamlines the process of deploying code, eliminating the need for manual requests and enabling the automatic creation of essential resources like source code repositories.  

When initiating a new product, such as a Customer 360 application, the portal facilitates the easy naming of the product and seamless assignment of team members, which might include product owners, managers, developers, and designers. 

Once the team is designated, their entire development environment—complete with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines—is automatically set up.  

This autonomy enables developers to focus their efforts on delivering business value rather than getting bogged down by administrative or procedural hurdles, ultimately driving efficiency and innovation. 

Easier access to data  

Scott asks the audience: “Do you have the business saying they want more access to data, or they need to have easier capabilities to data? Yes, of course! One of the keys [elements] is around data fabric.” 

Businesses frequently demand greater access to data and simplified capabilities for leveraging it effectively. The concept of a data fabric or data mesh addresses this need by enabling seamless integration across different data technologies within an organization. For instance, financial data might reside in an SAP warehouse, while sales and marketing data are stored in a Snowflake database.  

The complexity arises from the need to access and pull data from these varied sources to fulfill sophisticated business use cases, ultimately delivering the required business value. 

By adopting strategies such as establishing guardrails, enhancing the developer experience, and improving data access, organizations can significantly boost their speed to market. Embracing these strategies can empower technologists within businesses to achieve up to a 50% increase in efficiency.  

Rather than restricting business-driven initiatives, fostering collaboration and providing the necessary frameworks and capabilities can drastically reduce development timelines and enhance overall productivity. 

A proven strategy: bridging technology and business 

Calibo’s approach has demonstrated significant success, as evidenced by case studies like Nature Sweet, where a digital platform was set up in just eight weeks. This rapid implementation cut typical development timelines by half, showcasing the effectiveness of an integrated, end-to-end strategy. 

The foundation of a digital ecosystem is pivotal for modern enterprises, offering transparency across all developed products and fostering a collaborative environment between IT and business units.  

Scott highlights that: “Ultimately, it’s about creating enduring business value by establishing a synergy that enhances speed, reduces costs, and aligns with evolving business needs.” 

Calibo’s success is more than conceptual—it’s a proven method for digital transformation, ensuring businesses are equipped to meet the demands of a rapidly changing technology landscape.  

With an eye on innovation and a commitment to efficiency, Calibo empowers organizations to race towards their digital future, creating both digital and data products that deliver on their business promises. 

As Gartner quotes: 

“Platform engineering is the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms. Each layered platform is managed as a compelling product to optimize developer experience and productivity.”   

Gartner, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024: Platform Engineering, 16 October 2023  

“As internal developer portals get tightly integrated into software engineering workflows, their user experience will have a direct impact on developer experience and team productivity.”

Gartner, Market Guide for Internal Developer Portals, 21 September 2023. 

Key points in summary 

Implementing these 3 areas results in a 50% reduction in time-to-market. 

By implementing these three areas below, Calibo provides a whole view of your software and data development cycle from design to production, with its product release orchestration.  

1. Putting guardrails in place: Enforcing security measures and governance through code scanning and user access management. This enables automation of provisioning and CI/CD, ensuring both compliance and speed.  

2. Enhancing developer experience: With Calibo’s Internal Developer Portal, developers can easily access integrations with varied technologies, allowing them to concentrate on core business objectives.  

3. Merging software and data engineering: Calibo’s Data Fabric Studio provides a cohesive platform for engineers to build scalable data pipelines, integrate with diverse data sources, and streamline AI/ML capabilities.  

All these features are backed by Calibo’s platform engineering capabilities that enforce governance and security and integrate with your own tools, which are the tools that you already know and use in your engineering process. 

Find out more about Calibo here.