The previous installment of this series left off with the call to continually ask “why” when engaging in your governance activities. Putting this in terms of our three example topics, we get:
- Why do we need to get rid of paper?
- Why are we moving to the cloud?
- Why are we preparing to use AI?
After a bit of discussion, most clients respond with reasons like these:
- To be more compliant
- To more flexibly manage our information infrastructure
- To produce faster, higher-confidence, and more insightful analyses
This is definitely better, but it still isn’t quite it. “We want to be more compliant” may put a finer point on the reason to ditch paper, but what it really speaks is to the far more powerful requirement to reduce risk.
One obvious example is the risk of violating the rules of retention because paper-based information can get lost in warehouses full of boxes and lead you to (even inadvertently) keep them forever.
- The risk of incurring fines for having violated privacy and/or security strictures
- The risk of violating the rules of retention by losing things in warehouses full of boxes and keeping them forever
These points, at last, gets to the crux of the matter by addressing precisely the sort of business issues that keep your bosses up at night. This is your best shot at capturing their attention – something, as you well know, that is essential to making any measurable headway.
Not incidentally, the same is true for issues on the other side of the ledger, i.e., not risk reduction but opportunity capture. Continuing with our three example themes, the governance case thus can look like this:
- Reduce risk: re compliance, good governance can help sort (in the British sense) the likes of your cybersecurity, privacy, and security issues due to documents being left in public places in the office (e.g., on the copy machine), or leaving the office altogether.
- Reduce risk: re the cloud, good governance can mitigate the risk of destruction in a fire, flood, or other natural disaster by identifying your most critical information and moving it out of harm’s way.
- Capture the opportunity: re the cloud, good governance can help save operational time and money by flexibly designing and scaling your infrastructure to support more ready access, findability, shareability, and leveragability of the information people need to do their jobs.
- Capture the opportunity: re AI, good governance can help you get the most value possible from AI by improving the quality of the information that is input to it, the results it outputs, and the business outcomes you can expect as a result.
And that right there – outcomes, especially successful ones – is the only reason we should do any of what we do.
Previously: Good Governance is About the “Why”