Time for CIOs to ratify an IT constitution

IT governance is simultaneously a massive value multiplier and a must-immediately-take-a-nap-boring topic for executives.

For busy moderns, governance is as intellectually palatable as the stale cabbage on the table René Descartes once doubted. How do CIOs get key stakeholders to care passionately and appropriately about how IT decisions are made?

America’s 18th century would-be constitutionalists — 55 delegates, including George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton — knew something about governance. They understood that if people always made the right choices and did the right things a constitution would be superfluous. Governance is necessary because humans are flawed.

The authors of the US Constitution knew they did not want the autocracy of a monarchy they had just won independence from but they were also painfully aware that the anarchy emanating from the Articles of Confederation was not a viable path forward. So, they crafted a constitution. Should CIOs do something similar?

Rethinking IT governance

The delegates to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention came together because the current system of governance was not working. Has IT governance sunk to such a state of disrepair that a total rethink is necessary? I asked 30 CIOs and thought leaders what they thought about the current state of IT governance and possible paths forward.

The CFO for IT at a state college in the northeast argued that if the CEO, the board of directors, and the CIO were “doing their job, a constitution would not be necessary.”

The CIO at a midsize, mid-Florida city argued that writing an effective IT constitution “would be like pushing water up a wall.”

The CIO at a billion-dollar-plus conglomerate questioned whether most organizations were “sophisticated enough to develop a meaningful constitution.”

The CIO at a southern manufacturer thought that an IT constitution would be a great idea if the right people were on the committee that crafted it — and, very importantly, if there was an “IT Supreme Court” to rule on disputes.

The executive in residence at an AI infrastructure supplier asked, “What would an IT constitution look like?”

The responses of these learned interlocutors gravitated immediately to the question of whether an IT constitution could work — not whether an improved form of IT governance was necessary.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville argued, “A new political science is needed for a world altogether new.”

Everyone I speak too agrees that IT governance can and should be improved. Everyone agrees that one can’t have a totally centralized, my-way-or-the-highway dictatorship or a totally decentralized you-all-do-whatever-you-want, live-in-a-yurt digital commune. Has the stakeholder base become too numerous, too culturally disparate, and too attitudinally centrifugal to be governed at all?

Improving IT decision-making

I believe IT has to operate with a changeable but not mood-based set of core rules, customs, and principles — see Cheryl Smith, The Day Before IT Transformation: 35 Technology Leadership Practices for Transforming IT.

CIOs need to have a conversation regarding IT rights, privileges, duties, and responsibilities. Are they willing to do so?

The CIO at one of the best governed counties in America polled 268 of his peers asking whether they were concerned or implementing any form of governance, risk, and compliance within their organization. Less than 2% replied affirmatively. It appears that IT governance is not a hill that CIOs are willing to expend political capital on.

Aristotle was a big fan of “thinking on thinking.” IT governance is a subject that deserves much more attention than it is getting. I believe a plausible, no-damage-to-professional-credibility case can be made by CIOs stressing the need to improve mutual understanding of stakeholders.

Psychologists tell us that individuals make approximately 35,000 decisions a day. How many of these are technology related? Would having an IT constitution improve individual IT decision-making?

Political scientists tell us that the current dysfunction of America’s three branches of government is in no small way attributable to the fact that citizens, elected representatives, and public servants are essentially working from hundreds of different “realities,” based on situation, education, skill set, and/or aspiration. The folks who crafted the US Constitution thought they had solved this problem. How do we get to the point where we can talk to one another intelligibly?

In contemporary law there is the concept of duty of care — the basic idea that people in specific positions or occupations are responsible for putting in place measures that help ensure, as far as possible, the safety or well-being of others who are under their care.

Putting in place an IT constitution that celebrates subsidiarity — the idea that problems are best solved by people nearest to them and lets stakeholders shape the way governance occurs and authority is exercised — is an important agenda item for 2026.