Clinton’s e-mail scandal another case of the entitled executive syndrome

[Commentary] The inspector general of the Department of State recently issued a scathing report on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server during her tenure there, further securing the episode's legacy as perhaps the most historic case of "shadow IT" ever. Paying a State Department employee on the side to set up and administer her personal e-mail server, Clinton claims she just was doing what her predecessors did—but you'd be hard-pressed to find any government executive who ignored rules, regulations, and federal law so audaciously just to get mobile e-mail access. If you've worked in IT for any amount of time, you've run across the shadow IT syndrome—employees using outside services to fix a problem rather than using internally supported tools. Sometimes (but rarely), using a work-around is actually mission-essential.