Governance Without Measurement is a Waste of Time – Deadly Sin Number 3!
Published:
September 17 2009, 09:42 AM
by
Robert Stroud
For Deadly Sin 1, click here.
For Deadly Sin 2, click here.
Recently I was visiting with a financial organization who told me about their governance implementation and the results of a self assessment that they had just undertaken. The organization had been implementing multiple governance processes for some time but until that point had not done an assessment and were not sure of how good or bad the implementation was. Upon review they found that in some process areas they were at a maturity level of 5 when the organization needed to be a 3, thus dramatically over servicing the domain. In other areas they were a 1 when they need to be a 4 – leaving the organization exposed. The sin being committed was that no one had monitored the implementation or was accountable for the metrics that were now being visualized.
Governance must have a set of processes that provide feedback loops to understand whether the processes status should be represented on a balanced scorecard or on dashboards that show the status of each key performance indicator.
More important than visualizing metrics is that the responsibility for metrics must be allocated and this must account for part of a role or there is no reason to even collect the metrics.
COBIT provides an excellent maturity model for each process allowing you to not only determine your KPI’s but the maturity model allows you to assess where you are and where you need to be!