The Business-Oriented CIO: A Guide to Market-Driven Management

Chapter 2. IT Governance

When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are to be called, will be the same.

—Alexander Hamilton

If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.

—Arthur Goldberg

Edwin A. Abbott wrote a short novel in 1884 called Flatland, the story of beings who live in a two-dimensional world.^[10] The protagonist in the story is a square, who interacts with triangles, pentagons, and so forth and cannot imagine a world of three dimensions. If you draw a line between two flatlanders, they can no longer see each other because they have length and depth, but not height. The line works for them like a wall does for us. Looking at a flatlander's house is like taking the roof off one of our three-dimensional houses. Peering down, we can see multiple inhabited rooms separated by walls. We can observe the three people in the living room, two more in the kitchen, and one in the bedroom. However, they cannot see each other because of the walls separating the rooms. Although our view of the house is simpler than theirs, it provides us with more information about its structure and its inhabitants than that experienced by those inside it.

Corporate governance should work in a similar way, providing a simpler yet more informative view into the structure and inhabitants of an enterprise. Governance, ...