Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Governance Structure

Either for governance or management, structure is not just for constraint, but for shaping the broader box of understanding and taking the systematic approach.


As the digital world becomes so hyper connected and dynamic, it’s no surprise that we will see more of a sharing between disciplines of knowledge domains for solving complex problems, managing opportunities, and overcoming common challenges. 

Sound governance is part of eliminating risk and doing the right thing, so it is a framework with a set of standards to improve business effectiveness and maturity. Beside good governance practices and behaviors, a systematic governance structure/body builds a solid foundation to enforce the organizational manageability and maturity.

Governance structure provides philosophy and principles to orchestrate digital transformation: Governance is to frame business management discipline, it should orchestrate change, do it with trust and flexibility. It’s important to set core digital principles for building a conducive climate and nurturing a working environment in the organization where creative thinking is encouraged and innovation rewarded. The problem with governance today is often that people enforcing governance normally have a frame of reference based on their own perceptions and experiences; or governance behaviors are too restrictive that stifle innovation. Governance philosophy provides ongoing inquiries into the nature of governance based on abstract reasoning; governance principles offer a set of rules to develop empirical methods and next governance practices.

Governance today as a discipline is a living breathing entity which continually requires stroking and attention in the digital era. Thus, its structure would be solid enough to enforce good behavior in terms of its processes, its interactions with external systems, its components, the specific interaction among them, etc. Structures and rules are tools to be focused, effective and accountable, but structure and rules are not good governance in and of themselves. The solid governance structure along with healthy governance behaviors and best practices steer the organization forward and frame the emerging digital management discipline of reorganizing, refocusing, rebalancing resources, and redirecting.

Governance structures provide a systematic frame and common languages, criteria to explore the broader scope of governance discipline for harnessing holistic management: Governance can begin with frameworks, structures, policies to be put in place, depending on the nature, scale and complexity of the organization. The more complex contemporary organizations across the vertical sectors are, the broader scope of corporate governance turns out to be. The governance concern is that businesses will lose sight of their prime purpose. To manage a seamless business transformation, it is important to envision “To-Be” state first, because it creates a paradigm shift in your management approach. With more structural governance disciplines, business management becomes more future-driven and holistic to enforce seamless business consolidation, modernization, alignment, integration, and optimization.

Well structured governance enforces the breadth and depth of business management with strong alignment, transparency and accountability. Fundamentally, governance is about enforcing decision effectiveness, making seamless management alignment, and getting the people, culture, accountability, and performance right. Business alignment is a continuous process that demands continuous attention, deliberately close alignment among the company’s strategic direction. Strategic alignment and synchronization can catalyze the flow of the right information to the right people timely, enabling realization of the “future state” of the business by ensuring functional, structural and portfolio alignment. With strong governance, alignment goes beyond conformity and order-taking, it needs to include a close business partnership through interpersonal communication and effective governance discipline. The organizations that have high-mature alignment outperform their competitors and tend to be highly responsive to changes and good at innovation.

Governance with a solid structure can provide common processes to deliver real-time accountability and transparency across regulatory areas of decision making, management, assurance and compliance audit, legal and regulatory terms:
Governance is indeed about how well an organization is being run and if set up right, it should effectively oversee the achievement of the vision, mission, and objectives. In order to function, an enterprise has to be linked to the many and varied ‘touchpoints’ between itself and the marketplace environment of which it is a part today. because governance usually focuses on the risks that people are well aware of - and avoiding mistakes that they will not make anyway. Often the transitional periods are painful for adoption of changes and old governance models may be counter productive.

So the well-structured governance today is informative, proactive, and automated; should be handled and prioritized in such a way that they're inherent in the way we ask our staff to work and don't negatively impact our flexibility to deliver clear solutions and concise information to key decision makers. There are often disruptive processes or technologies that need some relaxation of the old governance models during the changeover with goals to enforcing information-based real time management practices. It makes sense to have governance structures and processes that are more flexible, lightweight, continuous, and that focus more on results rather than detailed plans. In fact, fine tuning of governance structure and processes will also become easier, cost effective, and more transparent.

Enterprises have always been parts of simple or complex ecosystems. That is the fundamental nature of the marketplace and the environment within which the enterprise functions. Either for governance or management, structure is not just for constraint, but for shaping the broader box of understanding and taking the systematic approach. The value proposition of good governance should be integrated within and across operations not siloed off in a box, and the practicality of structured governance is to enable, inform, and improve the effectiveness, holistism, and maturity of business management.

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