Communications of the ACM

would be to give us what we wanted. Now we can go to the cloud and just rent the damn stuff.” —Sales manager of a financial services company

“It’s about time that central IT asks us what we want. And now when we tell them they listen. I always wonder if they listen because they want to be more responsive or because they know we can just go buy it ourselves. Thank God for the cloud. It gives me the ultimate trump card.” —CIO of an insurance company business unit

The survey and interview data suggests business and technology professionals understand the governance process is changing and the number of participants in the governance process is increasing. Vendors, service providers, partners, and colleagues in the cloud are now governance stakeholders. Vendors and service providers are special stakeholders since the products and services they offer define de facto governance. Companies that outsource huge amounts of their operational infrastructures outsource many of their technology standards and the governance around those standards. While the standards themselves can be broad, they still define what the hardware, software, and service offerings will be.

Environments that outsource lots
of technology and technology ser-
vices share governance with their
providers. Similarly, suppliers and
other partners frequently require spe-
cific technology-based transaction
processing that also results in shared
governance. 9, 22 The crowd is one of
the most dramatic challenges to cor-
porate governance. The crowd is the
ing the “recommendation” to adopt a
more collaborative, participatory ap-
proach to technology governance:
Here are some insightful quotes
from some of our technology executives:
“It was only a matter of time before
the businesses demanded more con-
trol of technology. I mean, we sort of
kept them at arm’s length for years.
Once Apple started making stuff that
everyone really really wanted, we were
toast. So we had to give up some con-
trol.” —CIO of a chemicals company

“The world really is flat. We sell products all over the world and have databases and applications everywhere, including the cloud. It is impossible to control everything from one address. We had to rethink governance, or there would be a revolution.” —CIO of a technology company

“We will be 90% cloud-based in five years. Our vendors have as much to say about how we govern technology as we do. Pretty soon, cloud vendors will be telling us what we can and cannot do.” —CIO of a pharmaceuticals company

“Gone are the days when IT calls the shots. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. For a long time, we owned all the technology and the processes for buying and implementing technology. But now we have to move faster and open up our standards to businesses that need more technology faster and cheaper. I guess it’s about time.” —CIO of a financial services company

“Working with the businesses is
great. But they don’t always under-
stand how complicated IT is or how
much work it takes to get technology
to work. We have to work with our ven-
dors and consultants constantly to get
all this right. The businesses worry
much more about what technology can
do for them now, especially for sales.
That’s great, but it takes more than
hand waving.” —CIO of a financial ser-
vices company

“The lines of business get it. They understand that they need our infrastructure but want more control over the applications they use. Makes sense to me, so long as their decisions keep the infrastructure viable. We can’t have a free-for-all. There have to be some rules, but I get that the rules need to be more flexible. I get that now.” —CTO of an insurance company

Here are some quotes from our in-
terviews with business executives:
“IT is the group that tells me what
I can’t do, not what I want to do with
technology. That has to change or we
will fall behind. When I ask for new
technology, my question assumes
that IT can make it work. Or I will
find it somewhere else.” —CEO of a
biotech company

“Cloud computing has given us all hope. Not just because it represents a good alternative but because it frees us from corporate IT. It used to be that for us to get some new database or application we had to ask IT, which then told us that it would be too hard to do. Since we depended on IT’s infrastructure to get things done, we had to accept their ‘interpretation’ of how easy or hard it