Maybe it's just that I haven't been fortunate enough to encounter leadership that's not like that, but this story sounds right to me.
Try to think of it from leadership's perspective. For the sake of simplicity, let's say there are 100 similar initiatives proposed each year, each costing $1 million. That's $100 million per year in pure costs to the business (ignoring amortization, tax shenanigans, etc). Even for a bank, that's real money, to be strategically spent and not wasted.
With that setup, making leadership feel the pain and understand at a visceral level why this particular million dollars is well spent, is all at once a good strategy, rational for leadership, rational for IT, and a healthy-ish dynamic for the business.
Aside/tangent: In a very real sense, executives are managers of the finite time, employees, expenses, etc. of the business. Now, you could, and I would, argue that they're nearly always not especially good managers, and that the purely rational choice from "the company's" perspective is to pay them more like regular employees and not so lavishly. However, "the company" doesn't make decisions, people do, with all their political games, incentives and self-interests. Since executives control the flow of information/decisions/resources/money in the company, they siphon off an out-sized share for themselves, acting as a (perhaps inevitable?) parasite on the host company. Fixing this problem is left as an exercise to the reader.
Or to the writer. Bjarte Bogsnes has written a couple of books on this; Implementing Beyond Budgeting is worth reading.
The core of the idea is that the decisions that the overall body makes are so much worse if you try to combine managerial control with budgetary control that you want to separate them as much as possible. Set goals; provide budgets; don't link the two. Yes, as an executive you have responsibility for the overall spend. So employ people you can trust to do that well, and don't sweat the details.
> Since executives control the flow of information/decisions/resources/money in the company, they siphon off an out-sized share for themselves, acting as a (perhaps inevitable?) parasite on the host company.
Reminds me of the sociopaths in The Gervais Principle. Highly recommended.
Try to think of it from leadership's perspective. For the sake of simplicity, let's say there are 100 similar initiatives proposed each year, each costing $1 million. That's $100 million per year in pure costs to the business (ignoring amortization, tax shenanigans, etc). Even for a bank, that's real money, to be strategically spent and not wasted.
With that setup, making leadership feel the pain and understand at a visceral level why this particular million dollars is well spent, is all at once a good strategy, rational for leadership, rational for IT, and a healthy-ish dynamic for the business.
Aside/tangent: In a very real sense, executives are managers of the finite time, employees, expenses, etc. of the business. Now, you could, and I would, argue that they're nearly always not especially good managers, and that the purely rational choice from "the company's" perspective is to pay them more like regular employees and not so lavishly. However, "the company" doesn't make decisions, people do, with all their political games, incentives and self-interests. Since executives control the flow of information/decisions/resources/money in the company, they siphon off an out-sized share for themselves, acting as a (perhaps inevitable?) parasite on the host company. Fixing this problem is left as an exercise to the reader.