Employees appear to be taking the trend one step further, however, according to a new survey out today from online database software company Intuit QuickBase, which found employees are increasingly bypassing IT for a DIY approach to tech. Inspired by Forrester’s “HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees” report from last year, Intuit QuickBase and Global Strategy Group asked 903 information workers across America about how they come up with the tech solutions they need at work. They found:

• 50 percent of information workers now turn to online databases and Web-based productivity apps, instant messaging platforms, video chat services and social networks to solve their own business problems without consulting IT.
• 19 percent of respondents had customized a web app or software for work.
• However, 35 percent of businesses still do not enable or encourage employees to create solutions independently.

The reason employees are taking matters into their own hands is fairly clear from the survey results – speed. Sixty-eight percent of workers who built or customized an app on their own completed the work in less than a week. Seventy-two percent of respondents said their internal development teams took more than a month to complete requests.

“The speed of business is increasing, and that’s driving a greater user demand for solutions,” Allison Mnookin, VP and GM of Intuit QuickBase, explained in an interview. “Information workers are seeking ways to compete. How do I be more nimble? How can I be more efficient?”

Other recent surveys have found IT is simply overwhelmed with keeping up with consumerization and the seemingly endless parade of devices and platforms it brings, so perhaps their slow response is understandable, but so is the desire of a tech-savvy workforce to get things done quickly. Employees increasingly import the expectation of painless, speedy IT from home to work. “Business users believe their pain should be solvable. In their personal lives, they’re starting to use technologies that suggest to them there must be a way,” said Mnookin.

Should IT resign as sheriff?

So is this move toward increasing tech independence a good thing, particularly as teams are spread more broadly in terms of location, creating added coordination challenges with distant IT departments? According to Intuit, employee-built solutions are working. Eighty-two percent reported their solution is still being used within their organization or team. And even if IT tries to stop the spread of this DIY ethos, it appears they have a hard time doing so: 17 percent of workers said they select tools and software to meet their needs even without IT approval.

There are also other reasons for IT to empower rather than try to control workers’ DIY impulses: Stifling them is irritating to the most proactive and presumably productive employees. Twenty-eight percent of all workers told Intuit they would consider moving jobs for a more technologically free work environment. For those crafty employees willing to go rogue and solve problems despite IT discouragement, that number increases to 50 percent.

Are these engaged and solution-orientated workers really the ones organizations want to lose? “Here are employees that see problems and want to fix them, and for most companies, those are the employees that you love,” said Mnookin. “And those are the employees that, with the wrong policies, you put most at risk.”

Which isn’t to say IT should suddenly take a completely Wild West approach. “Certainly, there are important rules in terms of data, governance and security that IT has always been the champion of and will continue to be important,” Mnookin said, but overall she is a fan of IT letting its hair down a bit when it comes to releasing employees’ tech creativity.

IT increasingly realizes the world is changing. They can’t do it all and they’re better off provisioning and checking on the things they care about from a governance perspective than just locking down employees, knowing that a certain proportion will just do this regardless.

If you view your role as enabling business to compete and serve customers successfully than that demand for the speed of change will be impossible [for IT] to meet alone. I think the old model of everything is build and solved by IT is going to die.

Do you agree with Mnookin that IT needs to loosen up and let motivated employees solve more of their own problems without interference?

Image courtesy of Flickr user toolstop.

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Using Amazon’s EC2 computing service results in charges to the end user whenever the application up and running, whether they’re using it or not, because the program is still drawing on the EC2 compute power. Unless a startup wants to force customers to quit the program whenever they’re not using it, some measure of compute power is still necessary.

The Bungee Labs offering is a development platform where programmers go to build, test and deploy applications. It’s in the same camp as offerings such as Rollbase, Coghead or QuickBase, except that from a developer’s point of view, everything is done in the cloud. Such a holistic approach means a developer doesn’t need to get storage or compute power from Amazon — or any other vendor — before building and deploying the product.

Bungee doesn’t charge developers until the product is deployed, either, but the company’s director of marketing, Brad Hintze, told me the infrastructure is already in place and said that letting developers build and test for free isn’t a huge cost. “The math is working out so far,” he said. He also noted that until the end of the Bungee beta period — slated for late 2008 or early 2009 — even deployments are free.

Bungee will charge developers only when the program is talking to the Bungee servers and drawing compute power. It can afford to do this because Bungee owns the infrastructure and is running one program — the BungeeConnect platform — on that infrastructure. While building an entire software business in the cloud isn’t feasible for everyone, it might be a cheap way to test the waters for a fledgling software startup or even as an internal IT person at an enterprise.

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