David Linthicum suggests here that Shadow IT is not all a bad thing. He references a PricewaterhouseCoopers study that suggests that 30% of all IT spending comes from the business directly… from outside of the IT budget.
In the data warehouse space we can confirm these numbers easily. Just google on “data mart consolidation” to see the impact of the business building their own BI infrastructure in order to get around the time-consuming strictures and bureaucratic processes that IT imposes on a classic EDW platform. Readers… think of the term “data governance”… governance implies bureaucracy. And a “single version of the truth” implies a monopoly (governed by IT). We need a market for ideas to support our business intelligence… and a market is a little chaotic.
What we need is a place where IT says to the business… we cannot get you integrated into our formal EDW infrastructure as fast as you would like… but don’t go and build your own warehouse/mart on your own shadow platform. Let us provide you with a mart in the cloud. Take the data you need from our EDW. Enhance it as you see fit. We can spin up a server to house the mart in the cloud in a couple of hours. Let us help you. Use the tools you want… we think that it is cool that you are going to try out some new stuff… but if you want to use the tools we provide then you’ll get the benefit of our licensing deal and the benefit of our support… but you decide. We need IT to allow a little chaos…
This, I believe is what cloud offers to the data warehouse space…. the platform to respond.
But there is a rub… data warehouse appliances from Teradata, Exadata, and Netezza require bundled hardware that is not going to fit in your cloud. A shared-nothing architecture is a tough fit into the shared disk paradigm of the cloud (see here). The I/O reliance of a disk-based DBMS make performance tough on a shared disk platform. I think that for data marts and analytic sandboxes the cloud is the right choice… if you want to minimize the size of the shadow IT cast by lines of business. An in-memory database (IMDB): HANA, TimesTen, or SQLFire may be the best alternative for a small cloud-based mart.
David Linthicum has it right in spades for the data warehouse space… we need some user pull-through… and we need cloud computing as the platform to make these user-driven initiatives manageable.