The central challenge of IT governance is the simple dependency: application depends on database, database depends on server, server depends on switch, application depends on application and so forth. IT organizations deal with this critical data on a daily basis and treat it shamefully - essentially as a disposable commodity. Dependency information is expensive. It is typically gathered by assembling two or more highly compensated individuals to (again and again) go over what is installed where, what it talks to, and what it needs to run.