Abstract:

Organizations spend significant financial resources on buying/developing, maintaining, and supporting organizational and departmental Information Systems. Hence, organizations expect employees to utilize these systems for day-to-day operations and decision-making, and many organizations mandate their employees to use these official systems. However, some employees might covertly deviate from using these official systems and use other systems and solutions to perform work. For instance, using self-developed Excel spreadsheets and analytics tools for report generation and transaction recording or using cloud file-sharing services instead of what is available and fully supported by the organization are two of many examples of Shadow IT. Furthermore, despite all the measures organizations take to reduce them, Shadow IT solutions persist and proliferate as employees persistently opt to switch to these alternatives (Furstenau et al., 2017).