Governance and Enforcement

Governance as we always hear it is nothing new at all in IT world. We create a set of standards and conventions in order to ensure things can be done more efficiently in long run and minimal risk of downtime incur to BAU. New developments or changes has to go through approval board, some call it CAB. However most approval process are merely a decision based on written regulation in the big governance book and not made to help the business achieve the goal of having governance at the first place - that is to enable things to run more efficiently in long run and ensuring minimal risk of BAU downtime.

This in turn result in the inefficiency of the governance framework in an organization as it is treated as enforcement rather than governance. A lot of governance framework in an organization is not revised over times and this contribute to the inefficiency of governance in an environment that is fluid and change over time. In BW project, a lot of project consultant finds it hard to perform after go live support that require immediate fix as they have to go through rounds of approval for transports and they are not allow to directly create objects in Production environment that support emergency data load such as infopackage. 

At the end, if the rules in the governance book is not bent to suit the business needs and its urgency, this is merely blind enforcement and not a practical way of governing a system. A lot may argue that if we allow it to happen one time, it will happen again. So in short , it is up to the governance board to exercise their power in tackling difficult situation and that is when in depth knowledge, experience and exposures are important criteria for an effective governance authority.