Good Governance is About Outcomes

So far in this series, we’ve examined the need to look past the high-level, task-oriented governance work we’re nominally charged with performing, and to tie your goals to highly-visible, corner-office concerns like risk reduction and opportunity capture. Next, we’ll turn our attention to the only practical way our ultimate success will be gauged: by the outcomes we achieve.

The first step toward figuring this out is to determine where you’re starting from and where you want to end up. A big part of this exercise involves identifying what’s currently working and what isn’t, for fixing the “what isn’t” is a significant part of the work you have to do. This be may be cultural, procedural, technical, or a combination of the three, but you can’t address any of it if you don’t know what it is. And you certainly can’t tell if you’re progressing toward your goal if you haven’t defined what it is.

The second step is to quantify what your progress actually looks like so you can convincingly demonstrate the advances you’re making, or spot areas that need additional attention or even general course-correction. As management guru Peter Drucker famously wrote, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” and it’s as true today as it was when he said it.

The next question clients inevitably then ask is, “What should I measure?” The answer(s) should be fairly evident if you’ve followed the logic chain presented above, for you’re going to extrapolate them from the results of asking “why” and identifying the associated risks and opportunities. For example:

• Re compliance: Is the number of incidents of lost information, or the time it takes to find something in particular, increasing or decreasing?
• Re more flexibly managing your information infrastructure: How much more quickly can you manage your computing resources to perform maintenance, adjust access rights, or modify storage capacities? Are the overall costs of doing so going up or down?
• Re producing faster, higher-confidence, and more insightful analyses: How much time is it taking to write and improve your AI queries, review the results returned, and make any needed corrections?

These questions can only be determined by knowing what the figures are now, and what they are after you’ve done your work. The difference between them represents the outcome you’ve achieved and is likely to bear heavily on whether you can continue on your journey, need to take a pause, or drop it altogether.

Previously: Good Governance is About Risks and Opportunities