Section 3.5. Controlling

3.5. Controlling

The arrival of enterprise services will create a new tool for corporate governance that in fact makes governance easier. Departments can be forced to use centrally provided services on the one hand, but could also be empowered to develop their own services for other purposes. The relationships between departments increasingly will be described in terms of who is providing what service and who is consuming it. Service-level agreements between IT and business units and among the business units themselves could be defined in terms of what kinds of services would be provided. The choice between centralized and federated governance will be able to be made with unprecedented granularity, on a service-by-service basis.

In all of these dimensions, a company will transform itself in terms of its culture and its self-image. Those who succeed in this transformation will understand their new identity and manage the process of adopting it with conscious forethought.