Governance and Entropy
Entropy is a measure of the energy not available for useful work. In governance the entropy measure is high and increases over time.
It is usual in the early phases of an Outsourcing or Shared Services transformation for there to be a lot of energy available for governance. It’s importance is clear, there will be numerous meetings to discuss the best process, the right metrics, how change is to be managed, what the reporting rules are, who makes decisions and based on what evidence. Advisors will review the approach, offer suggestions on improvement and guide with learning’s from experience and industry best practice. Stakeholders from within the business and Service Providers will be brought in to understand where responsibility lies, who is accountable and what they will see reporting on, who they will rely on or be accountable to for service delivery. Expectations will be set and all those involved will likely feel satisfied that they have done a good job, focused on the right things and have designed a robust process with rigour and objectivity that all parties can trust.
And then, over time, things change. The energy dissipates, issues come up, the focus moves on to other things and the once robust process becomes fragile, the objectivity diluted and the rigour half hearted. Relations become strained because the process isn’t trusted. This is the common experience we all have of a governance process.
Why?
The answer is that maintaining the energy, the focus and the attention required for a really excellent governance process is hard. The day to day activities require effort, attention to detail, consistency in approach, striving constantly for excellence. That is very hard to maintain and when something is hard to do it is very tempting not to try.
Governance activities are rarely sexy, often un-exciting, usually manual, and not assigned high value by employees because they recognise, probably rightly, that the enterprise does not value them. That is until things go wrong.
Collecting governance data is a chore, a Friday afternoon activity when all the important stuff is done.
In the real world people hate governance, they hate the word and what it implies. Of course everyone will say they recognise the importance of governance and that it is critical to success but when it comes to doing it then the reality is clear. Governance is seen as at best a necessary evil. It is perceived to be a barrier to productivity, to getting things done, a distraction from the real work. Reviewing SLA’s, tracking performance indicators of every hue (key, critical, value), reviewing benchmarks, tracking quality or service delivery, monitoring issues and resolution, is boring, repetitive work that no rational person will want to continue to do for very long.
In the vast majority of cases the quality of the governance process depends on the commitment of an individual or set of individuals, usually armed with a spread sheet. The irony inherent in using a guy with a spread sheet to underwrite the governance of a multi-million dollar business transformation impacting potentially tens, or hundreds, of thousands of customers, employees, suppliers, and the IT, Finance, Sales and other systems involved is deep.
Is there a way to increase the energy available for this work? The short and simple answer is no. The solution is not to attempt to fight the laws of physics.
The solution is to use software to do what software does best. To remove the tedious, manual tasks that people don’t want to do. To automate processes so they get done the same way every time. To manage workflow so a is discipline maintained and the right behaviours are enforced. To manage data and do calculations which are accurate and reliable. To release people’s time, effort and energy for things they actually want to do – analysis, decision making, things that bring value.
This demands an investment by the enterprise. It is an investment in tools to do things that make their people better.