Similarly, do you as a CIO oversee IT/business project steering committees where unanimity and consensus are as elusive as unicorns? Have you ever insisted that these committees stand by their budgets, schedules and deliverables as a unit? Let's be honest: Much of the problem is that accountability has become a fancier word for blame. We all say we want accountability, but who wants to be blamed? (I am constantly surprised by the Enron-like denials of accountability on the part of top executives.) Yet we need to encourage individual and group initiative even as our processes, apps and systems become more cross-functional and interdependent.

Frankly, CIOs who claim that partnership with the business units is the way to go must muster the courage to acknowledge reality. They need to insist that steering committees ostensibly designed to promote strategic alignment and other such feel-goodies be retooled around accountability. Steering committees should be platforms for accountability before being internally marketed as exercises in risk-sharing and strategy.

While in Australia recently, I heard CIO after CIO bemoaning the fact that when something succeeds, the business takes the credit, and when something fails, IT gets the blame. The steering committee chatter I heard made it clear that accountability wasn't a serious factor in their design or deployment. Consensus? Unanimity? Nonsense!

I can't help but believe that more than a few CIOs would be better off if they began insisting on unanimity. More than six decades ago, one of America's finest aircraft designers - Douglas's Edward Henry Heinemann - oversaw the production of a myriad of state-of-the-art combat planes. One of his key managerial rules was that changes had to be made by consensus. This built both esprit and better integrated, high-performance aircraft.

The wonderful paradox is that leading by consensus may be the surest way of generating the kind of arguments and candid discussion that guarantee a productive collaboration between IT and the business. The power of the veto may be the best guarantor of it never (or seldom) being used.

But the most important issue here is that CIOs need to behave as if accountability is as important for committees as it is for individuals. They need to behave as if consensus is not the by-product of least-common-denominator compromises but the result of smart people successfully collaborating within constraints. At the risk of going meta, CIOs need to accept that they should be held accountable for how they hold their people accountable. Sometimes the best way of making people more accountable to you and to themselves is to insist they become more accountable to each other. Is that idealistic? Perhaps. But as one looks at the future of IT governance and project management, it increasingly seems the most pragmatic way to go.

Michael Schrage is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative. He can be reached at schrage@media.mit.edu