How to govern distributed IT?

So, one current meme is that centralized IT staff will increasingly be decentralized out to line of business embedded positions. This jibes with Nick Carr's thesis that the CIO title is akin to "VP of Electricity," a position that some turn of the century corporations did in fact have.

One question: Where does this leave the whole conversation we've been having around IT Governance? How do you govern something distributed?

-Charlie

Comments

[james governor]

LOBs take ever more of the IT budget. and waste it on stupid non standard platform decisions.

IT must be given the power to centrally mandate standards. otherwise the wasteful 1990s will be the norm not the exception.

i like business people. seriously, some of my best friends work in lines of business... :-) But do i think they can make informed platform decisions? in general no.

the central to distributed pendulum swings and swings, and seems to do so faster and faster. but any business that doesnt have someone there that can set technical standards is a wasteful organization.

[Bob Hays]

For example, some open source communities have a working governance process and are very distributed. Since governance is about making decisions, its a matter of getting the right people involved and keeping them connected enough to be useful in the process.

For companies moving capabilities off shore this can't be a new problem.

And this isn't about "business people" making IT decisions - its about people aligning much more closely to their constituents and representing their interests in tighter alignment. This will likely mean increased IT spend distributed around the organization (and so harder to identify), but then we've been in cost cutting mode for years and so now the pendulum will move back a bit.