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In housing, shadow IT isn’t some hoodie-wearing tech rebel spinning up servers in a cupboard. It’s far more British and far more tragic than that. It’s the Excel spreadsheet that started life as a “temporary tracker” during a HMS system or reputational issue back in 2018 and is now the only place anyone can reliably find your damp and mould cases. It’s the Access database built by someone “who was quite handy with IT” and left three restructures ago (we love restructures folks, don’t we?). It’s the compliance supplier web portal that everyone logs into because, frankly, it works, while the landlord’s own system gets updated later, badly, or not at all.
And before anyone gets sniffy, this stuff doesn’t exist because housing staff are idiots. It exists because systems don’t quite do what was promised, change requests (RFC’s) take forever, reporting is weak, and people are judged on outcomes, not architectural purity. When a neighbourhood officer is told to manage risk, meet deadlines, and keep tenants safe, they will use whatever tool actually lets them do that. Governance doesn’t fix a leaking roof.
The problem starts when the workaround quietly becomes the truth. That spreadsheet stops being “just for now” and becomes the thing everyone checks first. The core system becomes something you update to keep ICT happy. Extracts start doing the rounds by email. Versions multiply. Someone adds another tab. Someone else adds free text. Before you know it, you’ve got personal data, compliance information, and operational decisions sitting in a file called “FINAL_v7_REALLYFINAL.xlsx”. Strangely enough, organisations big & small all suffer from this.
At this point, congratulations. You don’t just have shadow IT, you have mission-critical housing services running outside any meaningful control. No proper security. No real audit trail. Poor or no clear ownership. No resilience when the one person who understands it goes on leave or, heaven forbid, leaves the organisation at the end of their contract. (where’s the knowledge transfer, good question?)
In a regulated sector, this should be setting off alarm bells. Boards are signing off assurances about data quality, compliance, and risk while large chunks of the evidence live in places the organisation officially doesn’t recognise. Auditors ask for a report and suddenly there’s a very awkward conversation about which system is “the real one”. Spoiler: it’s usually not the one that was procured quickly & cost seven figures.
Excel deserves a special mention here. Excel is brilliant. I use it daily. It is not, and never will be, a housing management system, an asset register, a compliance or any other kind of a database. The moment someone says “don’t worry, we manage that in Excel without really understanding how a VLOOKUP works”, what they really mean is “we hope nothing goes wrong and nobody looks too closely”.
Supplier portals get a free pass far too often as well. Portals are fine if they’re part of a proper data flow. They are not fine when they quietly become the system of record and your own system is playing catch-up. At that point you’ve effectively outsourced control of your data without admitting it, documenting it, or governing it. That’s not innovation or disruption, that’s drift.
The most corrosive impact of shadow ICT is what it does to trust. Once staff learn that “the real numbers” live somewhere else, the core system becomes ceremonial. Data quality drops. Reporting becomes a debate rather than a fact. Digital transformation stalls because nobody wants to give up the thing that actually works, even if it’s held together with formulas a hope and a prayer. I should know, I am a fallen Catholic.
This isn’t an argument for banning spreadsheets or telling staff off. Shadow IT is a symptom. It shows you where systems don’t match reality, where governance has slipped, and where organisations have quietly accepted risk in order to cope.
The danger isn’t that shadow IT exists. The danger is continuing to rely on it while pretending it doesn’t.
Because the moment Excel, a portal, or a side system becomes the place the real work happens, your “core system” isn’t core at all. And everyone in the room knows it, even if nobody wants to say it out loud.
Maybe its time a third party came in and rooted out all your organisations “Shadow IT” chief?
Related Post: The right Critical Friend will save you stress, time (and money) ?
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Joy Division – Shadowplay
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009
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