Two Boards, One Abdication: How Digital Governance Falls Through the Cracks
Who governs the digital commons? Nobody. By design. Company boards dismiss technology as "implementation detail." Architecture boards govern through belief rather than evidence.
The first abdication: company boards and the jurisdictional claim
Calling technology “implementation detail” is not a neutral categorization. It’s a jurisdictional claim: these decisions are operational, therefore not ours. Yet in a digitized economy, the operational layer is precisely where strategy lives and value gets captured. It’s where lock-in gets chosen, and rules get written. When company boards treat system design as beneath strategic attention, they aren’t avoiding detail. They’re ceding rule-setting to whoever is closest to the machinery.
Crucially, they allow themselves to operate disconnected from reality – if not divorced from it – in the realm of static and outdated “strategic” frameworks that fail to recognize the actual situation of the business. Mental models that lack situational awareness, or canned thinking sold by international strategy consultancies with big names, expensive bills, and often lacking ethical compass – as demonstrated not only by the infamous Gaza evacuation plan, but also by the countless redundancies caused by failed transformation programs based on nonsense such as “the Spotify method”.
The usual diagnosis of that dysfunction of Boards and executives is kinder: it’s a skills gap, a generational lag, a training problem. Add a tech-savvy director. Host a deep-dive on AI. But that explanation has survived too many expensive transformations to remain credible. I made essentially this argument in 2016 in an article on LinkedIn. A decade later, the pattern persists – which tells us something. We’re not looking at ignorance. We’re looking at a governance arrangement. And like most stable arrangements, it serves someone’s interests.
Three interests, specifically.
First, a misconceived sense of “dignity”. Admitting ignorance in a boardroom is costly. Declaring the domain low-status and pushing it down the hierarchy is cheaper. The case of Kodak illustrates this: the failure to adopt digital was far more the consequence of activist investors interested in next quarter’s dividend than internal resistance to change—as Professor Albéric Tellier’s research demonstrates. The board’s strategic horizon had already been captured by interests that preferred not to understand what digital actually meant.
Second, tenure. Some executives optimize for being gone before impact is measured. Outsourced governance helps: when outcomes disappoint, blame routes elsewhere. Volkswagen’s diesel-gate is instructive—senior executives benefited from years of performance metrics inflated by under-priced environmental and regulatory risk. When the scandal broke, they initially blamed engineers and technical teams. The pattern: benefit from opacity, then route accountability downward. And of course the Enron case offers an equally disturbing cautionary tale about groupthink justifying unwarranted personal gains leading to disaster.
Third, surface modernization. That’s about pretending to work towards progress just enough so that one cannot be blamed, but not to the extent that progress would undermine incumbents and the establishment. Gramsci called it “passive revolution” – change that protects incumbents rather than displacing them. Vendor-captured transformation programs excel at this: new tooling, new dashboards, new labels, while decision rights and accountability structures remain untouched. If you want the appearance of adaptation without the burden of choice, that’s not a failure mode. It’s the product.
The second abdication: architecture boards and the belief forum
So the company board delegates. Where does that authority land?
Typically, in architecture boards – internal forums charged with technical governance, which are all too often seen as internal technical suppliers or facilitators when they should be business partners. And these forums face their own legitimacy problem. They decide based on diagrams that may not reflect the live system. They adjudicate competing beliefs about what exists, what connects to what, who owns which data. Half the room guesses. The other half nods politely. A decision is made anyway, because the calendar demands it.
This is not incompetence. It is an institutional equilibrium shaped by a structural fact: when answers are expensive – when it takes weeks to discover what a system actually does – organizations can only afford a small number of questions. Governance becomes triage. The architecture board exists in that flawed form because the organization lacks legible, low-friction access to its own reality.
But here’s the conflict of interest: architecture board members’ authority depends on that partial legibility. They are the translators, the arbiters, the people who “know the system.” Their institutional position requires that reality remain expensive to verify. They become brokers of a “truth” that is essentially their opinion, not verified fact about how the systems actually work.
This is the mentality of “IT as internal supplier” – a function that will do whatever it’s asked by “internal clients,” with almost no accountability for actual business performance. In most cases, the architecture board governs belief, not outcomes. And belief governance suits everyone whose authority would shrink if the system could simply answer back.
Resistance to legibility isn’t mysterious when you see the stakes and understand the conflict of interests. Scribes resisted public education because literacy was their franchise. Today’s scribes include anyone whose authority depends on keeping tech reality expensive to verify.
The commons failure underneath both
Neither board properly governs what actually needs governing: the internal digital commons.
Inside firms, architecture, data, and shared platforms behave like commons – multiple parties depend on them, can degrade them, and have stakes in how they’re managed. The failure mode is recognizably Ostromian: powerful appropriators, weak collective choice, inadequate monitoring.
Company boards like to believe their firms are different – private property, clear hierarchy, no tragedy of the commons. But the relevant resource isn’t legal ownership. It’s legibility and enforceability. Without monitoring, rules become aspiration. Without credible consequences, principles become posters.
The same governance failures that plague planetary commons – atmosphere, biodiversity, climate – replicate inside enterprises. The pattern is fractal. The costumes differ.
When legibility increases, both boards face legitimacy crises
Introduce a destabilizing capability: systems that can answer back. Views generated directly from code. Principles that become continuously verifiable. ‘Time to answer’ collapsing from weeks to hours. This is not speculative—almost two decades of research by Tudor Girba and colleagues into what’s now called moldable development have made it real.
The company board loses its excuse. “Implementation detail” stops working as a jurisdictional claim when the detail can be surfaced as a strategic reality with multimillion dollars worth of business consequences; when that “detail” can be visualized, and presented in terms the board cannot pretend are beneath them. The question becomes unavoidable: if you can see what the system does, what will you still claim isn’t your concern? Or your fiduciary duty as a board director, particularly if the function carries consequences on people, data, regulatory obligations or environmental commons.
The architecture board loses its monopoly. When belief adjudication is no longer necessary – when reality is directly accessible – the translator role shrinks and the natural role of business partner emerges in plain sight. The board must shift from arbitrating what is to governing what should be. That requires different competencies, different legitimacy, different accountability. Many incumbents won’t survive the transition unchanged.
The question both boards should sit with
None of this means boards must become technical. Vagueness or imprecision can be a rational response or a choice – honest ambiguity under irreducible uncertainty, preserving option value until the landscape clarifies. But vagueness is also a socially legible way to avoid accountability, especially when the cost of knowing current reality is kept high on purpose.
So: who benefits from not distinguishing option value from evasion? When a board stays “strategic” by staying vague, who gains room to maneuver – and who absorbs the consequences when the maneuvering fails? What kind of negative externalities are caused in this way? Which stakeholders are affected?
Company boards and architecture boards have different interests in partial legibility –but both have interests. The question is whether organizations can build governance forums whose legitimacy doesn't depend on partial legibility. Forums where the discussion happens in the boardroom, not in technical backrooms shaped by vendors selling “solutions”, “quadrants” and “waves”.
If answers about current reality become cheap, what will your company board still call “implementation detail”? What will your architecture board still claim requires their interpretation? And when those excuses disappear, what kind of governors will remain in the room?