Getting to a Goldilocks decision-making structure. Process is good as far as it goes, but it is only part of the story. A Goldilocks decision-making structure that balances oversight and agility also is needed.

To help assess the effectiveness of your decision structures, ask yourself: Are we making the right decisions? Are we making timely decisions? Are decisions made with appropriate levels of oversight; that is, are decisions being made by people with the right level of seniority, or are the people making decisions too senior? Is our enterprise showing respect for and following the documented structure, or has it been replaced by ad hoc structures?

Depending on your findings, you will identify areas where your decision-making structure is just right and other areas where it is either too much or too little. Suppose you have a problem making timely decisions. Few of the decision process stages execute in a timely and predictable manner. There are two common reasons for this failure: there are either too many senior-level stakeholders involved, or there are difficulties identifying and contacting stakeholders.

To address this, look at the delegated authorities in your enterprise. Do they allow decision making at low enough levels to unclog the decision process? Also, actively engage with stakeholders to help ensure they understand their roles and responsibilities.

Getting to Goldilocks decision-making communications. Finally, to glue it all together, you need communications. The temptation here, and one that must be resisted, is to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach.

Communicating too much detail or communicating at the wrong time risks confusing stakeholders. Communicating insufficiently, late or inappropriately antagonizes them. Either way, chances of success are diminished.

Fortunately, Goldilocks comes to the rescue again. "Just right" communications delivers just the right information at just the right time to just the right people. To this end, appropriate decision making relies on stakeholder-specific messages, carefully designed around six components: who, why, what, when, how and feedback.

As for how to begin communicating like Goldilocks, ask yourself: Are we making the right decisions? Are our communications delivering the right messages to the right people? Are we delivering messages that are being understood by our stakeholders? Are we taking time to listen to feedback, and do we have a channel through which we can receive it?(Too often forgotten, listening is a very useful way of taking the "temperature" of the enterprise.)

Depending on your answers, you may uncover areas of too much or too little communication. For example, you may find that stakeholders just aren't getting the messages. If there's no evidence that they are informed about decisions or their role in the process, then the problem could be due to two reasons: the messages being delivered are either too complex for stakeholders to understand and relate to them, or they are insufficient and fail to inform stakeholders.

To address this problem, actively seek customer feedback on the decision process and outcomes. Gather feedback from stakeholders via both face-to-face discussions and formal surveys to help ensure the messages are getting across and verify what they believe and understand as a result. Also, listen to "noise" - that is, unofficial feedback and "water cooler" conversations. If noise increases or if you get the same half-truth from a number of sources, you may have a problem that improved communications can fix.

Making Goldilocks decisions. An effective IT decision-making environment helps to increase CIO credibility by establishing a virtuous cycle of process, structure and communications. Such an environment comprises: a decision-making process that achieves the right balance between rigor and cost; a decision-making structure that attains the right balance between oversight and agility; and decision-making communications that deliver the right information at the right time to the right people without overloading them with irrelevant facts.

To create an effective decision-making environment, a CIO must begin by assessing their existing one and then asking themselves: "What would Goldilocks do in a situation like this?"

Andrew Rowsell-Jones is vice president and research director for Gartner's CIO Executive Programs