Why I.T. is not like a shopping cart

Well, what CIO wouldn't want IT decisions made "at the highestbusiness level"? For years, management gurus and the IT media havepushed for committees like Drew's late-lamented supergroup as thesolution to the age-old problem of business-IT alignment. If a CIOcould just get all the top honchos in the company meeting regularly totalk about IT, the thinking went, all his troubles would beover.

Unfortunately, this ideal of good IT governance is more oftenphilosophical than practical. Even though big companies are nowspending more than 50 percent of their capital investment dollars onIT (according to Gartner), few have a supergroup to guide their ITstrategies. Most top executives still regard IT as a shopping cartfull of hardware, apps and systems, and the extent of theirinvolvement is to say, "We'll take that one and that one but not thatone."

That approach leads to flavor-of-the-month technology spending.Executives buy what they think they need to accomplish the short-termgoals of their unit. Corporate strategy? Pie in the sky. Technologyand business process standards? What's that got to do withthird-quarter revenue?

If they are ever to rid themselves of the IT-shopping-cart mentality,CIOs must create something better: a governance structure that 1.keeps IT and the business jointly accountable for linking technologyto the most important business strategies of the company, and 2.produces IT decisions that benefit the entire company and not just apart of it.