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
Figure 4. RACI participatory governance.
Participants
Operational
Technology
Strategic
Technology
Emerging
Technology
The Enterprise R/A/C/I R/A/C/I R/A/C/I
Corporate Functions R/A/C/I R/A/C/I R/A/C/I
Business Units R/A/C/I R/A/C/I R/A/C/I
Hardware, Software, and Services
Providers
R/A/C/I R/A/C/I R/A/C/I
Partners and Suppliers R/A/C/I R/A/C/I R/A/C/I
The Crowd R/A/C/I R/A/C/I R/A/C/I
Internal
External