4 New Bosses Enterprise IT Has to Fight in the Age of Cloud Computing

The IT department in any enterprise is a strange and unappreciated place. Requests either trickle in or come like a tsunami. Solutions range from troubleshooting blue screen errors to reconnecting an unplugged wire.

Enterprise IT teams have played an important role for decades, but exactly what that role is has changed a lot in recent years. For instance, SaaS has revolutionized the way an average business user downloads and uses low-code applications. But this causes severe headaches for an IT department that is used to having complete control over every application in their data territory.

From business process management tools to marketing automation, enterprise IT teams are finding it tough to negotiate this new world, and business users aren’t making it any easier. For example, someone looking for enterprise BPM solutions can immediately start using a solution like Kissflow without even notifying the IT department.

As enterprise IT teams continue on their quest towards data maximization, here are four new bosses they have to fight on their journey.

Bring Your Own Device

If you’ve used your smartphone to check work emails from a sandy Florida beach, or used your spouse’s tablet to upload a PowerPoint presentation over the weekend, you’re guilty of a modern workplace phenomenon known as bring your own device (BYOD).

In enterprise circles, workers who use business process management tools are prone to initiate requests or respond to approvals through their personal devices that are not under the scrutiny of the office IT. While several frontrunning workplaces have incorporated BYOD as part of their work culture to encourage collaboration and work flexibility, the majority of businesses are yet to come to grips with it.

IT is an entity that understands the problems and opportunities BYOD offers better than any other department. Whether they create a BYOD policy to block the use of personal devices or empower their co-workers with BYOD culture, it’s upon the enterprise IT to work around the issue. Enterprise BPM is there to make processes more efficient, and IT can facilitate the workflows by making BYOD work for and not against the workflows.

Shadow IT

Much like BYOD, the use of unauthorised apps in the enterprise workspace is another disputed area that irks the IT wing. On an average, enterprise employees use over 600 SaaS-based apps that are not within IT’s radar.

The ubiquity of such apps on the internet and their ease of use has enabled an average executive to skip IT’s approval and instead use the apps to get their work done, mostly with increased efficiency.

If your enterprise is using a cloud BPM software, it likely comes with integration capabilities to connect with a multitude of other cloud applications. If the trend continues without IT’s knowledge, these connections can pose risks to data integrity and jeopardize important workflows and other important processes.

But can IT help if employers are not consulting them to download some popular note-taking app? It’s definitely a tough job, but there’s hope. They can coach them about the danger of using unauthorised apps, expand their budget to recognize cloud apps that business teams need, or partner with them to create apps that are crucial to their work processes.

Depleting IT Budget

There is a strange love-hate relationship between IT and cloud applications. IT teams are usually not known to encourage the use of SaaS, but they are always expected to provide support for the unsolicited apps. And while corporate IT departments have grown bureaucratic and stagnant in nature, the widespread adoption of SaaS is projected to grow multifold in the coming years. SaaS applications are increasingly taking over the reins of network management, data storage management, server management, and security and identity management.

Undoubtedly, this has led companies to invest more on the cloud sector and cut costs across tepid IT departments. Cloud’s invasion on IT’s budget is yet another indication that IT is losing ground to the fast-growing SaaS sector.

The only way IT can jump on the growth bandwagon is to acknowledge the importance of BPM platforms and other cloud solutions and go hand-in-hand to achieve collective goals. The earlier IT teams embrace cloud platforms and support them, the better the chances to maintain their influence in the enterprise.

Data Governance

You can bypass IT to use your own device for work or download office productivity apps all you want, but you have to make a stop by the IT team to get rid of the virus that infected your hardware. IT plays a very strategic role in securing the enterprise data and managing its exchange within and outside an enterprise.

In the BPM context, suppose a workflow requires you to keep certain data confidential from employees even within an organization. Your BPM suite may or may not have such built-in capabilities, but your IT team is definitely in a better position to make it happen. They can help you hide or enable data visibility, track data mobility, and help with meaningful integrations with other software.

Interestingly, IT can make use of an efficient BPM tool to manage such security issues with deftness especially in today’s mobile and cloud environment.

Defeat them Bosses

IT teams face new challenges like they’ve ever faced before. Like encountering bosses in a video game, they have to build up new skills and weapons to attack them. IT needs to buck up and rise to the occasion or lose relevancy. They have to match the speed of cloud applications in providing value and facilitate the data gap to enterprise teams. Instead of being perceived as hurdles to data clarity, IT teams across industries should work together with the SaaS platform to overcome workplace bottlenecks and contribute to enhancing their enterprise’s value chain.