One paradoxical development? More use of manual EUCs
Jay also observed that while this elimination of manual processes has helped significantly, teams have paradoxically also invested further in using manual applications to fulfill their responsibilities. Staff are adopting EUCs – End User Computing applications – even more enthusiastically away from the office, given the challenges of collaborating with developers in the corporate IT function.
These applications can be Excel Spreadsheets, applications developed in SAS, MATLAB, or Python environments, or data visualization tools like Tableau. These are powerful, but uncontrolled, falling outside the realm of a corporate IT function. This lack of control can expose the business to multiple compliance, risk, and operational issues.
Jay suggested that the best practice for managing these EUCs isn’t to ban them, but to manage them proactively, like any other application. Organizations should apply the principles of application lifecycle management to support their development, management, and ultimately, their retirement. This capability needs a central EUC inventory, combined with self-attestation to capture the right application parameters – the significance to the business, any connections to other applications, and the application’s ownership, for example.