Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That difference in acquisition grief doesn’t stop there.

When you don’t have to buy (or free up) a server to try an experiment or pilot a new project, anything seems possible to developers. “We initially went to the cloud in very, very small isolated pockets of application development,” Kelly said. The cloud eliminated the developers’ problems acquiring capacity for new projects. “We began to streamline that process, because we went to the cloud, which is awesome. And we realized, wow, there are things here that we never really thought we could do,” he added.

“We didn’t really have the concept of super-scalable data sources. We’d have to upgrade the hardware; we’d have to cluster; we’d have to do this and that. When things like Simple DBA and S3 came out, that was like the beginning of realizing that we’re really in a situation where we can scale beyond anything that we thought possible, so we went back and started looking at what was possible.”

See the problem? This is why IT governance has to be rethought when you hit the cloud. One major justification for governance in the past was cost—all that hardware had to be bought, serviced and written off over years. It was a long-term financial commitment that justified governance. And for many organizations, that cost was the real driver for governance.

With the cloud, the cost is still there, but it’s easier to cut losses and the long-term accounting issues are simpler. If you’ve been using cost as the main reason for saying no to developers with clever ideas, it’s harder to reject those ideas when they won’t add capital spending and new racks in the server room.

But those projects still have to be governed—especially if they grow into production applications. “It is so difficult to support and maintain when you’re delivering 500 projects a year at the enterprise level and you’re trying to deal with lifecycle maintenance that goes back 8, 10, 12 years. You have 20, 30, 40, 50 different vendors in your space. You’re dealing with incredible amounts of high-speed data,” Kelly said.

Then there are the routine obstacles that corporate likes to foist on IT just to keep life interesting.

“Everybody lives in the world where it’s really hard to get a bunch of servers spun up in environments. You’re always battling everyone to get what you need, tooling, all of that. You have to go around security. The security issue is always going to be a huge issue in the datacenter. Even to get a VPN connection or datacenter-to-datacenter connection, it can take weeks,” Kelly said.

And why does all that require full-blown IT governance, aside from a desire to keep tidy flowcharts of who’s doing what? “Anything without governance immediately becomes a failure potential—oftentimes a catastrophe over the holiday season,” he added.

Another important Best Buy concern was adding layers of control without demoralizing programmers and developers, who had fallen in love with the carefree cloud approach.

“We are not willing to subvert programmers and are not looking to subvert brilliant people. What we’ve tried to come in and say is, ‘You can have whatever you want. You can use whatever software you want. But it’s got to be best of breed.’ So we brought in governance, but we brought in governance differently,” Kelly said. “Once we establish the best of breed for a particular product family, we’re going to mandate that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t bring in another product right next to it, as long as it’s not an overlap. So we ended up with SQL, No SQL databases. We have two or three different caches running. We have a lot of different messaging software running. We have our gateways. At the end of the day, you say to yourself that by trying to be all inclusive of technology, we actually have better governance than we had when we weren’t inclusive.”

That’s what governance is really for. And forgetting that on the way to the cloud is the one mistake you really can’t afford.