by Patricia Lundy
What’s preventing your organization from achieving your desired business outcomes? According to a recent report authored by VP Research Betsy Burton, the top roadblocks executives have cited include:
- Lack of a clear and actionable business strategy
- Internal infighting over decision-rights
- Ineffective goals and metrics
- No budget or accounting
- Changing priorities
- Immediate tactical needs consuming resources
How can organizations overcome these barriers to achieve their own success? This is where corporate governance can help. This blog will provide you with an introduction to governance and how to begin planning for your framework.
Governance Defined
Governance is the discipline of managing regulatory requirements, roles and responsibilities, investments, organizational structure, risk management, and performance management (metrics) to achieve business outcomes, including business goals and strategy, operations, compliance, etc.
Governance is also dynamic, and should be a continually evolving strategy. C-level executives must understand that changing business context, including business strategy, emerging technologies, industry, economics, regulatory requirements, and culture, all need to be considered in their governance discipline. For example, just think of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it continues to influence the way businesses plan for the future. To put it simply, governance is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of operation.
Establishing Your Governance Framework
This discipline encapsulates quite a lot of dynamic factors. To put it to work in your business, you first need to establish a framework so that it’s easier to understand exactly what you need to focus on. This is also essential to gaining executive buy-in.
We’ve created a framework that enterprises can use to model theirs after, containing what we believe are the key governance components. Think of this as a pathway of stepping stones that you can use to reach your business potential:
The Aragon Research Governance Framework.
Ethics is one of the critical component areas. With technologies like AI, predictive analytics, and IoT on the rise, new ethical challenges are bound to crop up. Organizations will need to make conscious and strategic choices about how to respond to new systems that have the potential to cause physical or societal harm.
To learn about each of these areas in depth and how to plan for them appropriately, register for our upcoming governance webinar on June 17th.
Bottom Line
The path to achieving aggressive business goals is often bogged down by a lack of a comprehensive plan. Using a governance framework can keep your enterprise on the right track and eliminate common challenges such as changing priorities, limited resources, and executive disagreement. To learn more about this invaluable discipline, join VP Research Betsy Burton for our upcoming free webinar.