NOTE: by “Enterprise” I mean any group of people working together in a defined organization towards a common Mission Statement.
PHASE ZERO: In the beginning, IT was used by a minority of people in any Enterprise.
PHASE ONE: The rise of “Enterprise IT”
BY THE MID-90’s most Enterprises had a dedicated IT department that did stuff like install networks and servers, provision workstations, set up general-use systems like email, deploy custom Enterprise-scaled applications etc. There was no “cloud”; everything was “on-premesis.”
All this new functionality started to incur corresponding new overhead: the IT systems had to be proposed, defined, paid for, implemented, secured, subjected to Regulatory / Compliance scrutiny, updated, up-graded, monitored, fixed, audited and eventually disposed of.
Because of all this overhead, requests made to IT teams started taking longer and longer to fulfill, and IT teams were generally seen as a bottleneck to getting desired IT functionality.
PHASE TWO The dawn of “Shadow IT”
BY THE MID 2000’s, Enterprise users of IT functionality encountering such frustrations found a way to circumvent the IT bottleneck: “the cloud.” Functionality such as file-sharing, document collaboration and even more complex functionality such as messaging and Project / Task Management was increasingly purchased directly by non-IT Enterprise users and teams, thus circumventing the IT team.
However the advantages (ease of deployment and use, low expense etc.) came with disadvantages, mostly having to do with Shadow IT systems’ non-compliance with Enterprise requirements such as Security, Auditing, Regulatory compliance and many more. To this day, the debate over the pros/cons of “Shadow IT” continues.
A NEW ERA?
Are companies such as $MNDY bringing “Shadow IT” into the fold of Enterprise IT…and vice-versa?
Here is my speculation: products like those supplied by $MNDY are ushering in a new age where Enterprise teams do not have to choose between the benefits of Shadow IT and Enterprise IT, because we now have products that supply the advantages of both. I speculate that $MNDY’s products are sufficiently compliant with Enterprise requirements (Security, Auditing, Compliance etc.) while ALSO being sufficiently compliant with non-IT-Teams’ requirements (ease of use, deployment and modification, etc.).
That would explain why (for example) $MNDY’s products are popular with non-IT teams such as Sales teams; to get the functionality they want, they don’t have to pay a lot, spend lots of time defining requirements, submitting those requirements to the IT Team etc etc. And they don’t have to go through the whole process again when they want to change things, because $MNDY’s products enable end-users to make the changes they want just by dragging and dropping.
The above are just thoughts inspired by the question “how is it that $MNDY can put up the numbers they are doing if ALL THEY PROVIDE is Project Management software?”
I think the answer includes these factors:
- It’s not just another task/project management system, it’s part of a REVOLUTION IN HOW ENTERPRISE IT IS DEFINED, DEPLOYED, MODIFIED AND MAINTAINED.
- It’s not just a task/project management system; in theory the approach and the toolset can be used for ANY BUSINESS PROCESS (e.g. it could in theory replace Oracle BPM, for instance). Thus the term/aspiration: “Work OS.”
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts regarding the story behind the numbers $MNDY is posting.
I haven’t taken a position yet in $MNDY.
