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Business users who secretly deploy their own technology leave CIOs unnerved. But their roguish behavior is sending IT a message. Can you hear it?
The call came at 3 a.m.
Francis Juliano was working as the CIO at a former employer he prefers not to name when he was woken from a sound sleep by his chief executive officer, who was traveling overseas. The CEO couldn't get or send e-mail through his corporate account and wanted to know why -- instantly. "It was a very heated phone call," Juliano recalls.
As it turns out, the marketing department had changed its outbound e-mail management vendor a few weeks earlier without telling the CIO, and it had made a few mistakes.
First mistake: While the marketers collected data on opt-out requests and new customers who responded to marketing e-mails, they didn't send this data to their new vendor. So people who opted out were still getting e-mails, and new customers weren't showing up in the company's database.
Second mistake: The marketers were sending e-mail campaigns through the company's own domain instead of using the vendor, which vets e-mail campaigns to ensure that they comply with antispam laws as well as antispam rules set up by major e-mail carriers like America Online. Within three weeks, the company surpassed its traffic limits and was flagged as a spammer. And so the provider shut down all its e-mail.
It took Juliano three days to restore order. "What really blew me away was the initial reaction [from marketing]," he says. "They said, 'How could you, IT, let this happen?' I said, 'Who? We didn't let it happen. You decided to go out on your own, and now you want to tell us it's our fault?'"
Welcome to the underworld of rogue IT projects.
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