Shadow Automation: When Business-Built Workflows Become Long-Term Technical Debt

Many organisations run vital work through ad-hoc automations: spreadsheets with macros, scheduled scripts, RPA bots, or low-code processes built by business teams. These 'shadow automations' solve immediate pain but quietly accumulate technical debt, create hidden dependencies, and shift responsibility away from IT. In this episode Mirko explains why business-built automations become long-term architecture problems, how IT perceives the maintenance cost, and where translation between urgent business needs and sustainable engineering decisions breaks down. Listeners get practical patterns for discovering shadow automations, deciding which to formalize, which to retire, and how to allocate ownership, budget and observability. The episode includes a generalized consulting example that shows common failure modes and a lightweight governance checklist that both business leaders and IT can use immediately to reduce surprise work and maintain agility.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-it-it-business--6867401/support.To continue the conversation, follow Mirko Peters on LinkedIn, where more insights and real-world examples are shared from both business and IT perspectives.