Gartner estimates more than 10 percent of corporate technology spending occurs in business units, beyond the control of IT. Several factors contribute to increasing hidden IT spending:

• Flat organizational models more difficult to rein in and control
• Virtual enterprise structures ostensibly set up as nimble, agile organizational constructs but without regard for policy and procedure
• Changing organizational authority where business unit managers are given (or take) responsibility for decentralized technology spending
• Selective IT outsourcing, in which a business unit will independently decide it doesn't need to participate in overall enterprise architecture to fulfill its departmental mission

Business unit-sponsored systems eventually become the responsibility of IT, increasing the cost of support and maintenance (there are those baseline costs again). Cultural biases in business units may conflict with overall strategic goals, increasing costs and resulting in the destabilization of information and knowledge. This is just as important for small companies as well as large; fundamental business decision-making is driven by solid information, and if we don't have it we can't do it.