The Many Faces of “Governance”
The term Governance is broadly-used in a variety of contexts; what they all have in common is leadership or governing, which explicitly involves informed decision-making. However, there are many common elements of governance programs:
Performance or quality management programs under the Governance umbrella typically rely on business analytics, performance metrics and business intelligence as supporting information for the leadership or governance of the organization.
Change Management is a form of Governance, as an explicit decision-making framework, including policies, procedures and technologies used to control change across designated areas of an organization, with varying levels of formality.
Portfolio Management, including Project Management Office operations, is a de facto governance framework, touching on many of the other elements named in this section. Decisions about projects, prioritization, investment, changes, performance and enterprise impact are often facilitated through a PMO.
Enterprise Architecture, including Business Architecture, Information Architecture and Technical Architecture, is also frequently associated with Governance programs because distributed decision-making across any level of an organization requires a clear, shared vocabulary and shared understanding of the impacted business processes, performance indicators, stakeholders, technologies and data.
Fiscal Governance is typically more mature in Public Sector organizations due to long-standing transparency and accounting standards and policies. However, financial decision-making is often inseparable from Change Management and Portfolio Management programs, as each new project and change must be considered for financial impact and prioritization.
