Wednesday, July 16, 2014

What is this Governance anyway?

Governance.  Woooo.  Such a scary-looking word. Sort of like --- aakk! -- "bureaucracy". But all it means is knowing how the organization makes decisions. Which is not to say that it is easy to get right.

Governance is just the process of defining how your organization will:
  • make decisions
  • see that the decisions are carried out, and
  • see whether the decisions are working as expected.

What's so hard about that? As the far as the words themselves, it all sounds pretty simple. Actually doing it can be another matter altogether. That explains why organizations continue to pay whacking great fees to the usual consultants, who now form a trillion-dollar industry, to provide them for the umpteenth time with a set of recommendations, procedures and templates that are no different from what was received the first time. They are, after all, best practices - or they would be, if anybody practiced them.


What we get out of governance is the framework that makes it possible to identify the right things, exclude the wrong things, and execute the remainder effectively.

The tools of governance are also fairly well-known: strategic planning, tactical planning, budgeting, financial management, contract management, human resources, project management, portfolio management, process management. Effective governance requires several equally well-known supporting skills such as cost estimation, market analysis, budgeting, contract management, human resources, and other skills that are particular to some industries. Probably the only arm of governance that the average manager might think to be something they know little about is is business and enterprise architecture, and as we will see, they already know most of what that is all about; they just didn't know it as "architecture".

That wasn't so bad, was it?
Why would we NOT do this?
Let's get started!

Please feel free to leave a comment, and explore the rest of the governance blog series.

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