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The term "shadow IT" was coined for systems built without corporate approval inside business units, departments and whole subsidiaries. Born from the IT backlogs of every organization, shadow IT can drive innovation and effectiveness without hindering larger IT evolution. While organizations wrestle to centralize their applications, the reality is shadow IT is not going away. As such, it is most effective to ensure the sustainability of shadow IT instead of attempting to avoid it. To be sustainable, this innovation at the edge must take advantage of central SOA environments and, when the time comes, seamlessly scale into a service-oriented enterprise and become an active part of it. However, for this to be achievable, edge applications must have certain capabilities and satisfy certain conditions. Large enterprises are continually struggling with the problem of deploying the right IT architecture to support their independent business units or remote subsidiaries. From the point of view of an IT organization, centralizing business applications makes sense, since it decreases cost of ownership and relieves maintenance headaches. The flipside of centralization is that branch organizations and business...
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The Prentice Hall Service Technology Series from Thomas Erl