Does Enterprise Information Technology Belong to the IT Organization?
The question nobody is asking, but probably should be.
Early in my career, I was the problem.
Not intentionally. I was doing what ambitious business leaders do: identifying opportunities, solving problems, moving fast. When the IT organization couldn’t keep up with what my department needed, I found ways around it. Better tools, faster vendors, creative workarounds. We called it innovation. The IT organization called it Shadow IT.
I didn’t fully understand what I was doing to them until I became one of them.
Three decades ago I made an unlikely move: from the business side of a Fortune 500 company directly into the CIO seat. What I inherited was a world built around two Hitachi mainframes, COBOL-based enterprise systems, and the specialized expertise required to keep them running. The people in that organization weren’t obstacles to progress. They were managing extraordinary complexity with extraordinary discipline, under constraints that most business leaders never had to think about. Security. Reliability. Integration. Governance. The unglamorous architecture of enterprise continuity.
That experience changed how I think about information technology permanently.
The organizational model that created IT departments wasn’t arbitrary. It was a structural response to technical reality. Mainframe computing and COBOL-based systems required centralized infrastructure, specialized expertise, and significant capital investment. The technology itself demanded organizational separation from the business. You couldn’t run payroll on Tuesday and let marketing experiment with the same system on Wednesday. The boundaries existed because the technology required them.
Over the following decades, those boundaries became cultural as much as technical. IT organizations developed their own governance structures, their own planning cycles, their own professional identity. The separation that began as a technical necessity evolved into an organizational assumption so deeply embedded that most enterprises stopped questioning it.
Information technology belongs to the IT organization. Obviously. By definition.
Except something is changing.
Cloud applications now land directly in business units, provisioned by a product manager with a corporate credit card. Software-as-a-service platforms are selected, configured, and operated by the functions they serve: finance, marketing, operations, HR, often with minimal IT involvement until something breaks. AI-assisted development is putting meaningful technical capability into the hands of people who have never written a line of production code. Network-as-a-service models are moving operational execution outside the enterprise boundary entirely, to providers who manage infrastructure on behalf of organizations that no longer need to, or want to, sustain that expertise internally.
None of this happened because someone decided the IT organization should matter less. It happened because the technology changed the equation. The specialized expertise that once made centralization necessary is increasingly embedded in platforms, abstracted behind interfaces, and delivered as a service. The barriers that made organizational separation logical are dissolving. Not by design, but by gravity.
Which brings me to the question I keep returning to.
If the forces reshaping information technology are pulling capability closer to the business, and the evidence suggests they are, what does that mean for how enterprises organize around technology? Is the movement of technology toward the business an inevitable structural shift, or a transition that still requires careful enterprise governance to deliver its potential?
And perhaps more provocatively: if information technology no longer requires the organizational separation that created IT departments in the first place, what is the IT organization actually for?
I’m not asking that question as a criticism. I’ve led one. I understand the value, the discipline, and the complexity that serious technology organizations bring to enterprises that would otherwise underestimate both. I’m asking it because I’ve watched enterprises spend decades and billions on technology without realizing the advantages that investment should have produced, and I’ve come to believe that the organizational assumptions we’ve carried forward from the mainframe era are part of the explanation.
The enterprises getting the most from information technology are doing something differently. It’s not the tools they’re buying. It’s not the vendors they’re partnering with. It’s something more structural: something about where technology decisions get made, who makes them, and how the organization is designed to translate technology capability into business performance.
That’s what this publication is about.
Not technology. Not IT. The relationship between enterprises and the information technology they depend on, and whether the way we’ve organized that relationship is still serving us.
The questions ahead of us don’t have clean answers, and I’m skeptical of anyone who thinks they do. What I hope to offer is a way of looking at the landscape that makes the path a little more visible, informed by four decades in the field, active research, and whatever this community brings to the conversation.
If you’re leading enterprise technology strategy, advising organizations through technology transformation, or building toward a role where those decisions will fall to you, this is written for you.