The Next Wave of Shadow IT Will Be Built, Not Bought

Description and use

Organizations are increasingly building unsanctioned automations inside cloud platforms, bypassing procurement and governance, creating hidden dependencies and security risks.

Problem

Organizations are increasingly building unsanctioned automations that operate without procurement, procurement oversight, or formal governance, creating hidden dependencies and security risks.

Outcome

A two-day manual reporting task was replaced by an automated flow that runs under a personal account, now used by four people for regulatory reporting, but remains undocumented and ungoverned.

Workflow

• Identify a repetitive manual task
• Use an internal productivity suite to create a scheduled flow
• Pull data from System A
• Reshape or transform the data
• Write the output to System B
• Schedule the job to run automatically
• Share the results with stakeholders

Evidence

An analyst in finance built a scheduled flow inside our own productivity suite that pulls a report from one system, reshapes it, and writes it into another, replacing about two days of monthly manual work.

Source