Govern emerging and experimental technologies before they become ungoverned shadow technology

Overview

The transition from emerging technology to shadow technology — from a technology that teams are considering but have not yet adopted to a technology that teams have adopted without governance visibility — happens faster and more invisibly than most governance programs recognize. A team that begins exploring a technology, finds it valuable, and adopts it for a project before the formal evaluation process concludes has produced shadow technology not through deliberate circumvention of governance but through the normal speed of delivery outpacing the speed of governance. The governance response is not to slow delivery to the speed of governance, but to make the governance process for emerging technologies fast enough and lightweight enough that teams find it easier to engage than to bypass.

Best Practice

Govern the transition from emerging to evaluated to approved as a fast-path governance process specifically designed for the pace of modern technology exploration. Define a lightweight registration process that teams use to declare an emerging technology interest before beginning any organizational use — a simple governance form that captures the technology, the use case, the team, and the intended scope of exploration. This registration creates the governance record that enables the TPM function to track the exploration and engage proactively with the team during the evaluation, rather than discovering the exploration only when it has already produced production usage. Design the fast-path evaluation process to be completable within the sprint cadence of the teams using it, so that the evaluation timeline does not create pressure to bypass governance.

Benefit(s)

A fast-path governance process for emerging technologies converts the most common source of shadow technology proliferation — teams moving faster than governance can track — into a governed exploration pipeline that the TPM function can see and engage with. Teams that find it easy to declare their technology interests and receive timely evaluation support are more likely to engage with governance than those who experience governance as a blocker to their delivery velocity. And the TPM function develops early visibility into the technologies that are attracting organizational interest, enabling proactive governance investment in the technologies most likely to require formal evaluation in the near term.