Shadow IT doesn’t start with rogue employees. It starts when the gap between ‘I need this’ and ‘we can deliver this’ gets too wide.
I’ve seen this play out at four clients in the past year alone. Marketing needs a report. The data team says it’s in the backlog. Marketing can’t wait three weeks. So someone builds it in Sheets. Then Sheets becomes the “pipeline.” Then Finance starts using it. Then it becomes a business-critical asset that quarterly filings depend on. Built in Sheets. By someone who left six months ago.
The instinct is to crack down. Lock permissions. Add approval gates. That usually makes it worse.
The real problem isn’t that people are building around you. It’s that your official channel is either slower than their workaround, or worse, people don’t know which path to follow. That’s an architecture problem and an organizational one.
What actually works: speed up the official path. Self-service with guardrails. Pre-approved datasets. Templated reports that don’t need a data engineer to build.
I’ll be honest - I used to be in the “lock it down” camp. Took me a few engagements to realize that governance-by-restriction just pushes the problem underground.
The goal isn’t control. It’s making the right path the fast path.
I’m genuinely curious - have you tried self-service with guardrails? What broke?