Why technology governance keeps getting harder

“I’ve been handed complex Excel spreadsheets that somebody’s wife was making for months and months,” says Helen Knight. “Then they’re like, ‘Now that we’ve built this tool to solve this problem you didn’t even know about, we want you to own it as IT.’”

This was before vibe coding.

Knight has spent decades watching people find ways around the technology department when the tools they want aren’t there. As president and founder of Helen Knight Nonprofit Technology Consulting, she helps food banks, shelters, and other social service organizations across North America modernize their technology.

Jennifer Hutton works in a very different environment. She is vice-president of information technology and risk and chief privacy officer at Steele Auto Group, based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. 

Both are finalists for the Fawn Annan Memorial Award, part of this year’s CanadianCIO Awards presented by the CIO Association of Canada.

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I sat down with both finalists to talk about build versus buy, what happens when employees bring their own technology into the business, and how AI is making an old governance problem harder to contain.

Read the finalist profiles:

I asked both finalists the same question: build or buy? Knight answered first.

“I’m 1,000% against build under a certain size, unless you have the capacity to have an ever-building dev shop that you can actually manage,” she says.

Hutton didn’t hesitate either.

“Absolutely, 1,000%,” she says. “As soon as somebody says we built this, that’s when I start working on how can we exit or sunset that product and bring in something off the shelf.”

Pushback can turn into an argument over why the company shouldn’t build its own system instead, says Hutton. That’s when she brings it back to what the business does.

“We sell cars, we fix cars, we service cars. We’re not in the software business,” she says. “We leave that to the software people. What we need is systems that work for us, work for our business process to ultimately serve our customers and our employees.”

AI has made an old problem move much faster.

Employees no longer need a development team or even an approved SaaS contract to start experimenting with new technology. That leaves CIOs trying to govern tools employees can start using before the rules are finished.

“The problem with AI is that governance is moving at human speed, and AI is not,” says Hutton.

She knows some employees will use AI whether the company allows a particular tool or not.

“Whether you block it or not, shadow AI is still going to exist,” she says. “People are going to use it. They’re going to use it on their tablets, on their phones. They’re going to circumvent the system somehow.”

Knight sees the same risk from the other side. Over 25 years, she’s watched how people view IT change, and not for the better.

“The assumption about IT people now is we’re stupid, we’re in the way, and they can do it better with their credit card, especially with AI,” she says.

She wants governance too. 

“You should absolutely have governance throughout the organization that prevents any concept of that,” says Knight. “Just like they shouldn’t be able to go buy a SaaS product off the shelf and suddenly implement it.”

For both finalists, choosing the technology is only part of the job. The harder question is how to keep people talking to IT while the ways they use technology keep changing.

In the full conversation, Hutton and Knight also talk about how the CIO role has changed, what they look for when hiring, why technology leaders need translators, and where they turn when they don’t know the answer.

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This article is part of a series profiling finalists for the 2026 CanadianCIO Awards, presented by the CIO Association of Canada. Hutton and Knight are finalists for the Fawn Annan Memorial Award. The winner will be announced Oct. 1 in Toronto. Digital Journal is the national media partner for the CIO Association of Canada.