The world that shaped that decision was one where technology was expensive, specialised infrastructure. Someone had to manage it, govern it, keep it stable, and make sure it didn’t become a liability. Someone had to carry the risk for the entire organisation - to keep the systems running, absorb the threats, and take the blame when something broke. We gave that role a name that encoded exactly what we expected of it: cost centre. The plumbing of the organisation. Absolutely essential - without it nothing works, nothing flows, nothing stays on - but not for a single second the thing you think of when you ask yourself what makes this business what it is.

We made IT the shepherds. We asked them to protect the flock. And they did - extraordinarily well, for decades, under enormous pressure and with very little credit. The cost centre model wasn’t a failure of imagination. It was a rational response to a world that needed exactly that.

The problem is that the model has become invisible. Encoded into org structures, budget cycles, board reporting, and the quiet but persistent assumption that IT is something the business has rather than something the business is. A utility. A managed overhead. A necessary constraint on the balance sheet rather than a source of competitive advantage.

That’s not a cost centre anymore. That’s a straightjacket. And we’ve been wearing it so long, nobody notices it’s there.

And now we are about to run our businesses faster and further than we have ever imagined. Agentic AI is not an incremental technology. It is going to reshape every process, every decision, every customer interaction - and it is going to do it faster than most organisations are prepared for. The people who are in the best position to help us do that without falling are the ones who understand what the technology will do before the organisation has felt it arrive. Who can read the conditions, navigate the complexity, and connect what’s possible with what the business actually needs.

Those people are in the IT department. And we have spent thirty years training them to say no.

This is where good intentions run out. One of the most clarifying pieces of feedback I received on an early draft of my recent work on IT leadership came from Gord at Info-Tech (Thanks Gord). He agreed with the entire diagnosis but pushed back on the solution with a precision I haven’t been able to shake. The argument, he said, is not about whether IT leaders should move from being the people who say no to becoming genuine strategic partners. Of course they should. Everyone agrees on that. The question is how - because this is not a mindset problem, and it cannot be solved by telling IT leaders to be braver or more ambitious.

“CIOs don’t want to say no. They want to say yes. They see themselves as true partners to the business. But they unavoidably slip back into shepherd mode at the first sign of a wolf.”

And then the line that stopped me: “Protect the flock. It’s what we have asked them to do.”

That’s the mechanism in a sentence. The IT leader who wants to be a growth engine but is being evaluated as a cost centre will - regardless of personal vision, regardless of individual courage - be pulled back into the model the organisation built for them. Not because they’re wrong. Because the system is. You cannot wish your way out of a structural incentive. The metrics pull you back. The board expectations pull you back. The accumulated weight of three decades of cost centre thinking pulls you back. Every time.

Which means the answer is not a more visionary CIO. The answer is an organisation that actively decides - deliberately, structurally, at board level - to see IT differently. Not as the plumbing. As the engine.

And that decision cannot be delegated to the IT department. It has to be made by the people who set the metrics, control the budget, and determine what success looks like. It has to be made before the agents are deployed rather than after they disappoint. And it has to be made now - because every week of delay is a week of agentic AI being implemented in service of the Victorian cost centre equation, faster and cheaper and more efficiently going nowhere different than before.

So what does that decision actually look like in practice?

It looks like a board that stops measuring IT on uptime and ticket closure rates and starts asking what the technology makes possible. That stops rewarding risk avoidance and starts investing in value creation. That extends to its IT leaders not just permission but genuine invitation - to the strategy table, to the growth conversation, to the question of what this organisation could become rather than just what it currently is.

It looks like a relationship between the business and IT that is genuinely reciprocal. Where the business leader brings their understanding of the customer, the culture, the competitive pressure - and the IT leader brings their understanding of what’s coming, what the technology will do to the problem before the business has even felt it arrive. Where neither is the gatekeeper and neither is the supplicant. Where they are, in the truest sense of the word, colleagues - thinking together toward a shared outcome that neither could have reached alone.

The growth engine looks at what the technology makes possible and asks what the organisation could become. It arrives at the board table not with a governance framework but with a vision. And in a world where agentic AI is about to reshape every process, every decision, every customer interaction - that is not a nice to have. That is the only deployment strategy that justifies the investment.

The IT leaders who can do that job are already in your organisation, ready and waiting.

They just need you to take off the straightjacket.

That conversation won’t start itself. And it won’t end if it never gets out of the IT department.

The IT leader can start it. But they cannot finish it alone.

What are you going to do to help them?