Leveraging the Shadow IT
Sometimes, when you look for innovative business practices within your organization, you find them everywhere--hiding just below the surface. That's exactly what happened when I saw an Airman code his own software solution to a problem. I started looking around our organization for similar stories, and found something truly remarkable.
Airmen all around our wing are teaching themselves how to program (often in Python or VBA), and are using these skills to disrupt industrial processes tied to data aggregation and correlation. The typical scenario I see is an Airman takes a Python class and/or hones programming expertise through self-teaching, then focuses his or her skills on the pain points related to manually gathering and correlating data for intelligence analysis. Using a DevOps environment, they create a script that goes after and integrates data according to an analytic workflow they know well. They market their app by giving it a creative name and icon. My favorite is Graphic Overlay Analysis Tool (or GOAT). The icon is a goat sporting machine guns on its back. These apps save their teams countless man-hours of data-gathering grunt work--hours the team reinvests into actual analysis.
These Airmen have created a Shadow IT, which has become a powerful force we need to leverage at scale. We are trying to provide our Airmen greater access to DevOps environments, Git repositories, and training resources. Most importantly, we are trying to streamline the process the Shadow IT influences and plugs into programs of record. All of these efforts come with various challenges, which are no different than those found in the private sector. Nevertheless, we continue to press ahead in partnership with our higher-headquarters, because we believe leveraging the Shadow IT's agility will be the difference between winning and losing.
Giving our young troops an ability to shape the capabilities we procure, develop, or already possess is good for retention. Leveraging their self-taught technical talents has also never been more important to the mission. Software and data are now the military capabilities that matter most. Our decisive advantage will be our troops' ability to create, develop, and integrate software and data at an unmatched speed and scale. My guess is this concept applies to many more organizations and industries. In each, there's undoubtedly a Shadow IT waiting to become a decisive advantage if leaders are willing to tap into it.
This is what real innovation looks like! It's problem solving. My compliments, Colonel, for empowering and endorsing this positive, creative behavior. With this, you will get more of it. We all win.
Agreed! Let them run! Let leadership adjust the rules as the game changes.
This article is spot on. I have seen our Airmen create such amazing time saving and enhancing scripts and mini programs. I offer unit funded Python and powers she'll courses for anyone interested in my units because they are so powerfully mission enhancing. Plus, I am offering Agile project management to organize the efforts. One unit completely automated the security manager job function even down to automated staff meeting slide creation and reminder emails. We built an automated tool to mesh data from disparate PMO cyber security tools and made dashboards to present the relevant data. Nellis AFB also created a similar tool which works on non-AFNet networks. We scripted automation for dashboarding and reporting outages and their impact. We have a new Cold Fusion server aggregating flight data systems into a dashboard. These programs can't normally live past their creator's time on station though since there is no PMO backing it for sustainment. Tons of greatness going on but no way to expand and sustain.
Great Article. If you a shadow IT person in DCGS I would love to hear from you.
Bless you!