So for instance the process of prioritization actually prioritizes what's important to each manager and, by extension, what's important to each individual manager in the governance group. In effect, prioritization prioritizes how important each manager's goals are. Prioritizing projects is a surrogate to deciding how important each manager's objectives are.

"To think of this as a 'problem', however, misses the point. Any reasonably sized business organization is full of managers with different goals. Of course, one would hope that the company's planning and management processes would sort through each business unit and functional goal. As every manager knows, this isn't often effectively done. So in effect, the IT governance and prioritization processes have to deal with the often-conflicting voices of each and every manager.

"Our point is that this is good, not bad. Politics actually reflect that the IT decisions are, in fact, important. We worry when we find clients where politics isn't a factor. This suggests that the IT decisions aren't viewed as important, that IT doesn't really affect what's important to each business manager."

Of course, IT needs effective management methods to deal with politics. But the analysts remind us of the importance of celebrating diversity in what business managers think is important, and of celebrating politics in our decision-making process. "This guarantees that business managers think IT matters, that the decisions being made are important to them," they say.

Yet another way to view culture is as an embodiment of the 'why things are done the way they are.' Under this view, all decision making within an organisation is culturally-based, as it indeed typically is.

Often, organizations will provide products and services to particular markets because that what the company does and because things have ever been that way. That's one reason why companies that do innovate, particularly with process innovation, tend to perform badly as a result, or fail to get the performance of efficiency dividends they looked for.

The innovative company needs to have a culture of organizational learning, allowing it to wrap up creativity, risk taking and learning from its experiences. Essentially, every day everyone in the company needs to questions whether they are providing the right products and services for the right people and delivering them in the right way.

And they have to keep a keen eye out for misalignments and misconceptions that can lead to missed communication, misunderstandings, and eventually (expensive) breakdowns. For example, what is highly valued knowledge and must be managed in one culture may be differently viewed and treated in another.

Real-time collaboration is likely to only exacerbate the pressures and highlight the differences. It takes leadership from the top - your leadership - to start turning that culture around.