The Accountability Gap.

When nobody owns the decision, everyone owns the blame. Or do they?

There is a pattern worth naming plainly, because it surfaces in post-mortems far more often than it should.

A cloud migration stalls at 60 per cent. An AI pilot concludes with a positive outcome summary and no production commitment. A cost overrun surfaced during a quarterly review that everyone attended, and nobody acted on it. The steering committee reconvenes. The vendor is reviewed. The project team prepares a lessons learned document. And then, quietly, the accountability lands in one place: IT carries the outcome while everyone else returns to their priorities. The decision existed on paper. The ownership never did.

That is the real problem, and it is not the absence of process. It is the absence of shared stakes.

In FMCG organisations navigating their first serious cloud transformation, the pattern tends to present as distributed ownership across commercial, supply chain, and technology teams, where each function has an opinion but none carries the outcome. In hospitality, where technology cycles are long and margin sensitivity is high, governance is often built around consensus, which means decisions get socialised until no one person can be held to them. In government agencies, the structure is sometimes present, but the authority is not. Someone owns the governance document. Nobody owns what happens next, and when something goes wrong, the technology team absorbs it alone.

The organisations that move past this do not solve it by appointing a single owner and expecting everyone else to follow. That model concentrates risk on one person and gives everyone else a reason to disengage. Research from the Harvard Business Review on cross-functional leadership consistently finds that co-accountability, in which multiple functions share explicit, documented responsibility for an outcome, yields more durable decisions and better follow-through than single-owner governance models. The Centre for Creative Leadership reaches a similar conclusion through its DAC framework: shared accountability is not a softening of responsibility. It is a more sophisticated form of it, one that requires direction, alignment, and genuine cross-functional commitment rather than compliance from below.

What this looks like in practice is not an org chart change. The steering committee does not need to become someone's full-time job. For most organisations, cloud and AI governance functions as an extension of existing roles, a second responsibility carried by people who already have the context and the relationships. What changes is the clarity of the mandate and the structure of the conversation that happens within it.

The most effective cross-functional programme leads encountered across APAC tend to approach it the same way. They build the financial narrative before the business conversation, not after. They arrive at every cross-functional meeting with the numbers already translated into terms that finance and risk can act on, not just terms that engineering can defend. This discipline is documented in how large technology organisations have structured financial gatekeeping into their product development processes: the financial case must clear a defined threshold before the strategic ask proceeds, because without that shared numerical foundation, the strategic conversation has no common ground. That principle is extractable from highly centralised models and transferable into coalition-based governance structures regardless of industry or organisation size.

The other thing they invest in early is the relationship with their finance counterpart, treating it as infrastructure rather than a gate to clear. And they create visible, specific wins for each function at the table, giving engineering, finance, risk, and the business units a reason to stay aligned rather than retreat to their own priorities.

The Deloitte 2025 Global Technology Leadership Study found that technology leaders in regulated industries cite governance frameworks as their most significant enabler of confidence in technology investment, ranking them above the technology itself. That governance is only as strong as the coalition of people responsible for making it work across functions that do not naturally share the same language or incentives.

Building that coalition is not complex. It does require someone to take it seriously before the investment decision is made, not after the consequences arrive. The organisations that do this well are not slower. They are more precise. Fewer decisions get made, but the ones that do hold, and the people who made them, are still standing behind them twelve months later.

JR Advisory works with enterprise, commercial, and regulated-sector organisations to build decision frameworks that make AI and cloud investments governable. If your organisation is heading into a major technology investment decision, the structure needs to be in place before the commitment, not after. April bookings are open at jradvisory.co.

What has co-accountability looked like in your organisation, and what made it work or fall apart? Share your experience in the comments.

And if someone in your network is navigating this conversation right now, this one is worth sending their way.

Sources

Deloitte. 2025 Global Technology Leadership Study. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/digital-transformation/global-technology-leadership-study.html

Harvard Business Review. Cross-functional management. https://hbr.org/topic/subject/cross-functional-management

Center for Creative Leadership. Shared leadership and the DAC framework. https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/shared-leadership/