Intelligent Agents Lurk in the Shadows

Forbes.com has an article this week about Shadowing IT.  As Dan Woods puts it, “Fueled by their frustration with the solutions provided to them by corporate IT departments and by the power of readily available software tools via the Web, users have started creating their own solutions in the shadows.”  

These solutions should be embraced! 

One of the biggest differentiators these kinds of solutions offer is the ability to quickly deploy them!  Take for example intelligent Agents…  Intelligent Agent technologies offer the ability for the end-user (the business-user, the researcher, the analyst, portfolio manager, whoever he or she is) to quickly train and deploy personalized intelligent software Agents to carry out the time-consuming, tedious tasks of data aggregation and mining.  Agent technologies empower the end user, rather than burdening the IT department. This empowerment should be viewed as HELP, not HINDERANCE.  We see it as a cost-savings, an ROI to the bottom line! 

It may take an IT department months to spec-out a business case, put a system in place, test it thoroughly, and roll it out to their users.  By that time, the main purpose of the exercise may be lost or too much time may have passed for the full value of the application to be realized.  We all understand the need for governance.  We understand the need for policy.  But if the end user can create and deploy his or her own time-saving, ROI-producing application, why shouldn’t they? 

I believe in Shadowing IT and like to believe that intelligent Agents are just one of the many Web 2.0 technologies that enable “do-it-yourselfing,” in the shadows.  It’s about time these cost-saving, ROI-producing, productivity amplifying tools creep out of the shadows and take their share of the limelight.  These tools are valuable to the bottom-line and will continue to become more popular and prevalent in today’s competitive tech-savvy organizations.  These tools are not going to wilt in the sunlight, they are going to feed on the creativity and applicability of the business user and flourish into technologies that the most competitive companies and best IT departments will be clamoring to share with their users. 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 8:58 am and is filed under General, Intelligent Agent Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.