Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Decentralization has arrived at Yum Brands–the $10.8 billion fast-food giant that is home to Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell, among others–and CIO Delaney Bellinger is on her way out. Bellinger, who has headed IT at Yum for the past decade, says Yum has moved to a more decentralized IT model. Bellinger is helping with the transition until the end of September, when she’ll retire from the company.

Yum’s shift to decentralized IT raises some interesting questions. After all, Bellinger has spent much of her tenure as CIO working to centralize IT for Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, A&W and Long John Silver’s. Indeed, getting the restaurants working to the same set of IT standards has been part of her job since before they were spun off from PepsiCo in 1997. So after all that work, why would Yum reverse course and decentralize? More to the point, what does it mean to manage the transition from centralized IT to decentralized IT? Doesn’t that just mean cutting loose business-unit CIOs so they can focus on their units’ business needs rather than toe the line for central-IT bureaucracy?

No, it doesn’t. Decentralization is not the reverse of centralization. Or if it is, you’re doing something terribly wrong.

Centralization is relatively straightforward. The goals are clear: You want to implement standardized equipment and standardized procedures. You want to eliminate redundancies and variations. You want to reduce the costs that come with whatever is different by reducing the differences in how IT is used by your various business units.

That usually translates into company-wide IT standards, and all the bureaucratic overhead that comes with enforcing those standards. But centralization can result in real savings in equipment and support, along with the elimination of wasted effort.

On the other hand, decentralization isn’t really about unwinding standardization and consistency. There’s no point to that. No one wants to inject waste and get rid of savings. Nor is decentralization just about eliminating bureaucracy, especially when it has helped provide a clear, consistent IT vision for the whole company.

In fact, decentralization isn’t really about the same things as centralization at all. It doesn’t involve going in the opposite direction. It’s really about turning IT inside out.

Consider one of the paradoxes involved in a move to decentralization: Business-unit CIOs must learn to be able to work independently, without always looking upstream for guidance.

But to get to that independence, they need–what else?–guidance. No magic switch exists to turn entire business-unit IT organizations into self-directing operations. There are new skills for CIOs to learn—and for CIOs to teach—because everyone in their IT shops will have to make the transition to decentralization, too.

In other words, the move to decentralized IT can’t involve abandoning centralized leadership—at least not all at once.

The paradoxes don’t stop there. Decentralized IT doesn’t mean business units can just go their own way, ignoring everyone else. If they do, it’s a costly mistake. Some of the most valuable resources for CIOs in a decentralized-IT situation are their fellow CIOs.

In part, that’s because every business unit has its own technology needs. The more decentralized a business becomes, the more likely it is that each business unit will develop its own areas of expertise. So if one CIO needs to start figuring out social networking or cloud computing or PCI or iPhone apps, there’s often a go-to guy among the other CIOs who has lots of useful experience in that specific area. Even if there isn’t, the combined experience of fellow CIOs adds up.