There's also the consideration that when my senior vice president of finance pulls together his reports for the SEC, he's not just pulling numbers from the general ledger. Instead, he needs information that comes out of other databases [that could be in the cloud] such as a breakdown of revenue, orders by products, and sales to OEMs vs. end users.

We took a different approach. Instead of being a roadblock, we decided to embrace every single business user's request for SaaS. This enabled us to shadow the implementation from the start and figure out where, if any, we'd need to have integration points immediately or down the road. Today, we have almost 20 on-demand applications, including a sales force database, HR programs, expense reporting, compensation management, time management and IT tools. This aggressive stance has helped IT get ahead of the on-demand services curve. Had they not, and users wanted dashboards or data integration, the vendors wouldn't have been able to help them and they would have had to come to IT anyway. This makes for a much better relationship between IT and business users.

Communication. Our vice president of finance and CIO regularly have lunch together. They understand that each has to make trade-offs for the good of the business. We also have a quarterly governance process where all executives and key business stakeholders debate potential projects and do a post-mortem on recently completed projects. We look at how we all performed in terms of cost, timing, functionality and other criteria.