“We want to move fast and break things. Governance wants to move slowly and blame things.”
Sound familiar?
If you’ve ever sat in a meeting about “IT Governance,” chances are your eyes glazed over somewhere between “risk mitigation” and “policy enforcement.” By the time someone pulled up the RACI chart, your soul was halfway out the door.
Let’s not sugarcoat it: IT Governance has a reputation problem.
It’s become the bureaucratic boogeyman of digital transformation. The speed bump on the innovation highway. The part of the IT strategy deck that even the CIO secretly dreads presenting.
But here’s the twist:
IT Governance doesn’t suck because it has to.
It sucks because of how we’ve built it.
And that means we can unbuild it—and reimagine it into something people actually believe in.
Governance Has Become the Scapegoat for Control Freaks
Let’s get brutally honest.
Too often, governance is just control dressed up in a three-piece suit. It’s used to rubber-stamp decisions that have already been made, to shut down rogue initiatives, or worse—justify inaction.
Governance becomes:
- The excuse for why we can’t go cloud.
- The reason we delay new tools “until next fiscal.”
- The document we dust off only when something goes wrong.
No wonder product teams roll their eyes.
No wonder business leaders go around IT.
No wonder the phrase “shadow IT” is now just… IT.
We built governance as a fortress—to defend against risk.
But in doing so, we kept opportunity outside the walls.
The Ghosts of Governance Past
We inherited this mess.
Governance was born in an era where:
- IT was a back-office utility.
- Change was quarterly, not continuous.
- Compliance was about not getting fined—not about creating value.
Back then, central control made sense.
Tech was expensive, rare, and dangerous in the wrong hands.
But now?
Everyone’s a technologist.
Everyone’s a creator.
Everyone’s deploying low-code apps while sipping a latte.
And we’re still governing like it’s 1999.
We’re playing defense in an age that demands offense.
We’re writing policies for technologies we don’t understand yet.
We’re building frameworks so rigid they crumble under the weight of actual use.
This is not just outdated—it’s counterproductive.
The Meeting That Killed Momentum
You’ve seen it.
A product team demos a prototype that wows the room.
A solution architect outlines a plan that solves a decades-old pain.
Then someone asks: “Have we run this through governance?”
Silence.
Then:
“We’ll need a review by the data council, a security risk assessment, and two steering committee meetings. Could be 6–8 weeks.”
By then, the momentum is gone.
The spark is lost.
The team’s already halfway to Notion, spinning up a workaround.
This isn’t governance.
It’s death by committee.
And it’s on us.
What Governance Was Supposed to Be
Let’s rewind.
At its core, governance is about alignment.
It’s the compass that ensures we’re all rowing in the same direction.
It should answer:
- Are we investing in the right things?
- Are we protecting what matters?
- Are we learning fast from our failures?
That’s not boring. That’s leadership.
Good governance:
- Empowers teams, doesn’t suffocate them.
- Creates clarity, not confusion.
- Builds trust, not distrust.
But we’ve let it drift.
We’ve turned it into a system of surveillance instead of a system of support.
We forgot that governance isn’t a control mechanism—it’s a collaboration framework.
Guardrails, Not Gatekeepers
The future of governance isn’t a tollbooth.
It’s a GPS.
It nudges, alerts, redirects—but it doesn’t stop the car unless there’s real danger.
What does that look like in practice?
- Principle-based policies. Not endless rules—just a handful of shared truths everyone can act on.
- Embedded governance. Baked into the dev cycle, not bolted on after deployment.
- Outcome-focused metrics. Measuring value, not just risk avoidance.
- Participatory design. Built with the people it governs, not imposed on them.
This isn’t fantasy.
Progressive orgs are already doing this.
Netflix, for example, gives engineers the freedom to deploy but equips them with “paved roads”—secure, approved ways to do it fast and safely.
That’s governance as enablement, not enforcement.
So Whose Fault Is It?
Ours. All of us in IT leadership.
We let governance become a silo.
We let fear drive the design.
We valued compliance over collaboration.
We optimized for audit-readiness, not agility-readiness.
And the business noticed.
They stopped inviting us to the table.
They started building their own tables—with their own tools, platforms, and vendors.
We can’t blame them.
We have to earn back the invite.
Rebuild It With—and For—Humans
So how do we fix it?
Start with this mindset shift:
Governance is a service, not a system.
That means:
- Design for usability. Governance should be easy to follow, not a full-time job.
- Prioritize speed and clarity. If it slows people down, it better be worth it.
- Make it visible. Governance that lives in PDFs no one reads might as well not exist.
- Iterate like a product. Test it. Gather feedback. Evolve it.
And most importantly—co-create it with the people it impacts.
Governance built in isolation will always be ignored in practice.
If Governance Feels Like a Buzzkill, You’re Doing It Wrong
It’s not supposed to kill energy.
It’s supposed to channel it.
It’s the difference between:
- A speed limit that slows everyone to a crawl…
- And a Formula 1 raceway with barriers, pit crews, and rules that let drivers push the edge—safely.
So let’s stop blaming governance for being boring.
Let’s stop building it like it’s a courtroom.
And let’s start designing it like it’s a launchpad.
🎤 Your Turn: What’s one way you’ve made IT governance faster, clearer, or more empowering for teams—without sacrificing control or compliance?
Rewrote or removed a policy that made no sense? Retired a committee that added no value? Removed a gatekeeper who says no just because they can?
🧠 Your advice might be exactly what someone else needs to hear.
💥 Your horror story might become their cautionary tale.
🛠️ Your small win might become someone else’s game changer.
👇 Drop it below. The mic’s yours. Let’s turn this comment section into a governance underground—less red tape, more real talk.
