For example, travel expense policies are an easy target — they should be replaced by good reporting, analytics, and public rankings — “Hmm… Why does these people only buy their tickets 2 days before each journey?” “Why does it cost this team twice as much, on average, to fly between the US and Europe?”

Totally agree.

I like your counter-argument, and it feels similar to the issue we both address constantly around social software: we can’t use that, we’ll lose control. When they’ve already lost control as soon as they push people to work outside their tools.

I think we can get there, with the will and the passion. Or, put more succinctly, Yes we can

Often times, the cost of an error is greater than the price you can exact on the person who made that error. They can’t be held accountable for $1B in market cap, but they can hurt it. In some cases the RTS are there to keep you from hurting more than yourself - like having to have car insurance.

My argument is typically: A determined person can already extract > $1B in market cap from you today. The RTS aren’t preventing that in the least. What’s really stopping it is (mostly) good judgment combined with some luck and relative obscurity.

I agree with the axiom of creating RTDS, but worry that the typical IT middle-mgt bureaucracy has been so successful at fear mongering for so long, that we may never get there.