When an executive sponsor leaves a technology initiative, the initiative keeps going and nobody decides anything, because the company treats the departure as a vacancy. The technology leader inherits the sponsor's tradeoffs without the sponsor's authority, and the initiative tends to finish diminished, finish with the CIO held responsible for someone else's value case, or die by neglect. This article sets out one rule, owned above the CIO: replace the sponsor within thirty days or pause the initiative, and require the new sponsor to reapprove the value case.

Ask three executives who made the call on the last major technology investment, and the answers may not match. This article names the structural cause: an official decision process on the org chart running alongside a real, unofficial one that carries the actual authority, unmapped and unreconciled. It closes with what fixes it, mapping what actually happened and making four things explicit before redesigning anything.

Funding approval releases money for delivery and rarely assigns anyone accountability for the outcome that justified the spend. This article names the three owners every funded initiative needs, separating technical delivery from adoption and from the governance that keeps the two connected. It ends with the two things that have to be fixed at the funding decision itself, an agreed value measure and the date it gets checked.