Sloan School of Management’s Andrew McAfee has a piece in the latest Harvard Business Review (subscription or one-off purchase required), and an accompanying post on the freely accessible HBR blog. McAfee argues that managers and executives outside the IT department need to understand some of the capabilities of the cloud, “because it’s going to change both how, and how well, their organizations work.” With a strong background in the Enterprise 2.0 community, McAfee clearly has faith in the transformative capabilities of IT. He’s also right that well-deployed IT can empower an organisation (and that badly deployed IT can sink it). But the same is true of production lines in a factory, routing, load, and fuel hedging in an airline. Do we expect the CMO or CIO to necessarily understand those? Well-implemented IT should be invisible to the rest of the organisation. Well-implemented IT should empower the organisation, not shout to be seen. Ignorance is never a good idea, but how much do we really need to ensure that non-IT executives know about the ins and outs of the cloud?