Act IV — Who is in charge now

Power is a concept that is widely used and ill defined. Many philosophers have discussed it, but not one definition really stands out. Before we attempt to define power formally, let’s see how the word is used in everyday IT situations. Understanding power in IT is not just academic. As the examples show it is crucial in understanding how IT works and creates value and risk. The cloud architect held significant power in deciding which platforms the organization would adopt for its digital transformation. Automated deployment pipelines gave development teams the power to release software faster and with fewer errors. Legacy systems often retain unexpected power in large organizations, simply because so many critical processes still depend on them. Regulators have the power to halt digital initiatives if data protection requirements are not met. By owning the central identity management service, the security team had the power to control access across the entire infrastructure. Outages at major cloud providers show how concentrated power in digital infrastructures can lead to systemic risk. The CIO used the power of budget approval to steer the enterprise toward adopting more secure infrastructure patterns. Power struggles between central IT and business units can delay the rollout of shared infrastructure services. With real-time observability tools, operations teams gained the power to detect and respond to incidents before users were affected. An open-source community can collectively wield more power than a single vendor when shaping the direction of a software tool. From these examples, we can see certain recurring features of power in the context of IT and digital infrastructures. ...

For many people, the word power has a negative connotation. They’d rather avoid using power altogether. I can feel that, and I can definitely feel that about the abuse of power. But does that make it unethical to talk about power? Power is everywhere, and conflict too. There is no society without a power structure. There are always differences of opinions in any group, if only to decide when to have lunch. ...

One of the key aspirations of Digital Infrastructures at Scale is to equip you with the tools to shape and drive change in your professional environment—especially when your goal is to lead a transformation. Every stakeholder has power. Here I want to highlight two important positions of influence in IT where technology meets power are architects and auditors/assessors. IT architects are builders. They design new applications, platforms, and infrastructures that enable businesses to operate more effectively. A CRM system, for example, is not just a technical solution—it transforms workflows, communication, and decision-making. Similarly, infrastructure architects create digital foundations that accelerate the deployment of such applications. ...

Power does not automatically flow from those that have it to those that are influenced by it. As they say in dutch, quoting the poet Willem Elsschot: “tussen droom en daad staan wetten in de weg, en praktische bezwaren”. (“between dream and deed stand laws in the way, and practical objections”). We want to understand this. If we want to exercise power, we need to understand the intermediaries. If we want to subvert power, the intermediaries are one of our disruptive points. ...

The US president Harry S. Truman famously had a sign on his desk that said: The buck stops here. This refers to the process of “passing up the buck”, meaning to escalate decisions to the next higher level in the organization. Truman implied that he took responsibility but also that this is where power comes from. This is an essential part of governance, and this vertical line of responsibility represents one way of looking at it. We can trace how this works in the following risk management example. ...

Shared resources can lead to conflicts. If the capacity runs out, somebody will feel the pain at the expense of somebody else. This conflict will be resolved in one way or another. Without other arrangements, the stakeholder with the most power wins. This is not necessarily the best outcome for the organization as a whole. To illustrate this, I gave ChatGPT the following prompt: Write a business case story about the conflict over shared computing resources. ...

Over the years, I have worked with many organizations, large and small. In one case, I implemented the exact same change in more than 15 organizations, whose size ranged from 35 to 35 thousand employees. You can imagine that this plays out differently across these organizations. But that is a story for another unit. It led me to see patterns in decision making and trust. Who takes decisions in an organization? How do people even talk about decisions, especially when they concern digital technology? Who do you trust? ...

How software grows A lot of software begins its life as the project of an individual, but ends up being used widely in organizations, or even society at large. I have seen many Excel files that started out as a small set of notes and grew to be the operational backbone of entire departments. Examples I have seen include complete bookkeeping ledgers, customer relationship systems, and planning tools. And the allure of tools such as Excel, Airtable, et cetera, is that they are flexible, and don’t require a skilled programmer to update them. The risk there, though, is that as the software grows in importance, its governance does not necessarily keep up. More specifically, there are specific thresholds that, when crossed, cause specific new risks. ...

Podcasting has its own digital infrastructures, for example in hosting them. Let’s look at how podcasting has grown, and what made it take off anyway? Many actors influence each other here, and the state of the art of the technology also has an impact on growth rates. Suppose a hundred people get told by an enthusiastic friend to try podcasting. Of these, ten don’t have any hardware on which they can play the podcasts. So the rest goes online, and tries to find interesting content, but only 50 people can find a directory in which they can even start to look for podcasts that they like. Only 40 people then find content that they sufficiently like. Ten people drop out because they find loading the content too complicated. Of these, another ten find out that the files are too big for the hardware they have (for example in 2005, they just had a simple MP3 player, no iPod or similar). Of the ones left, another five don’t have the patience for the downloads (we are talking dial-up internet access for a lot of people here, still). If you have been keeping tabs: we are down to 25 people who are capable and willing to regularly listen to podcasts. Now suppose each of these tells four friends, on the average. That means we are back to a hundred. ...

The international arena has many actors that can influence digital infrastructures. But opinions differ on what the important ones are, or even what the relevant ones are, as we will see. But the international arena matters, because by the nature of scaling, very few digital infrastructures are influenced by a single national actor only. A word of clarification: I am using the word international here to mean all nations in the world, and their interrelations. In US vernacular, the word international appears to mean all nations, except the US. Instead, the word global is used to mean all nations, including the US. An example implication of this is that a US company would only consider ISO standards to be relevant to them if they also have operations outside the US. ...