 Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Executive Editor of DataVercity. We'd like to thank you for joining this DataVercity webinar, Aligning Effective Governance with Business Subjectives, sponsored by BDNA. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. For questions, you'll be collecting them via the Q&A in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag DataVercity. As always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days, containing links to the slides, the recording of the session, and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now let me introduce to you our speaker for today, Jay Scroggins. Jay is the Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations with BDNA. He has over 25 years of experience developing, leading, and delivering technology solutions from startups to Fortune 50 companies with a wide variety of industries from global finance to open source operating systems. And with that, I will give the floor to Jay to get today's webinar started. Hello and welcome. Thank you very much, Shannon. Appreciate that. And thanks to everybody out there for taking the time to join us today. I appreciate that also. I want to give a little bit of context on my background. So obviously, from what Shannon said, there's a heavy technology bent to it, and I know that there's folks attending today's webinar that have sort of been on the technology side, been on the business side, and everywhere in between. So I think my perspective has, I guess I would say, my opinion on this, right? And this is simply my opinion on this presentation that we're going to be going through today. It has been sort of, I guess, set in stone, I guess, at this point over many years from being within enterprise architecture and having to provide sort of that enterprise view across a very large Fortune 50 plus company and having to be, you know, very mindful of the governance, especially in finance. Also at another company in reference data for a global bank. So governance there is extremist at least, not just on the financial side, but in every other country that you get into the ramifications of being a global bank, the data rules for Asia PAC versus AMEA, and every country therein differ a little bit, and they all have different governance processes that all need to be managed. To, you know, having many government customers where you have to verify sort of the policies and approaches that you take with your own governance to comply with other governance models in its layer upon layer upon layer. And having many years of methodology and process implementation experience. So, you know, those all give me some background, I guess, on the topic and certainly justify or not justify, but anyway provide me with the opinions that I have as well as my current role at BDNA where, you know, we provide solutions for, you know, helping folks with governance. So in today's presentation, I wanted to go over essentially, you know, instead of having an agenda here and saying these are the things that we cover, there's four main themes that I want to be sure that folks kind of take away from this. I would imagine that I'll probably end up repeating these in five different ways and everyone will be really sick of it, but I think that they're very important. In my experiences, you know, I've found many examples of, you know, governance is about a process, right? And I think that really misses the mark. There's a problem that needs to be solved. That's why governance is in place. Don't just follow that process. And too often, you know, even if it's something about managing risk or minimizing risk or optimizing spend or anything like that, the, you know, there has to be a business objective that drives it, the metrics verify it, right? And then the metrics obviously have data aligned to them. And that's sort of the critical thing. It's not about check boxes, right? It's not about how we create this process, and then if we do each one of these steps, we're good to go. And I think that too often also the governance model and the creation and implementation of it is separate from the business strategy, right? Whereas I think that in, you know, sort of in the design process of the governance model, those things, you know, this is about alignment, right? The creating the alignment that makes a difference. Now that also happens at multiple layers. It's about alignment between the stakeholders. But more than anything, it's about governance being aligned with the business, right? And when I'm talking about the business today, I'm talking about both the sort of the business, why we're in business, what we do to make money, as well as the technology aspect of it. So I think more and more those are becoming inseparable. And really more than anything, I want, you know, folks to understand that I think that it's really important that there needs to be a sense of urgency around this, right? That we have to take steps to do it now. And really that's, you know, the main reason for that is because we're in this agile era, especially, you know, within technology and all the businesses to support it. But we haven't changed our governance for the most part. And obviously I'm speaking in generalities. But, you know, there are exceptions to everything. But I think that the lack of alignment between our governance models and processes and where the business needs to go and wants to go really hinders us. So this is what I would call sort of the crux of the governance conundrum, which is, you know, essentially that the pace of business is way out in front of the pace of governance. And what happens in this, you know, it's sort of this vicious cycle, if you will, that it takes a lot more effort to get them aligned further you go down that path. And so, you know, then, you know, it's a big project or program in and of itself. And it takes a lot of courage to sort of stand up and say, okay, yeah, these things are, you know, widely off. Let's meet. Let's, you know, how do we bring these things back together? And too frequently there's not agreement, right? And again, that's another facet of the alignment on what the business problem is that's trying to be solved. And there's certainly no shortage of challenges. And it's not just about the speed. But when you look at sort of the different aspects, and you could take this picture and say obviously, you know, if you have the governance on one side and business agility, and again, that's both the business and technology groups on the other side, then across business process applications resources, just think of this, and there's probably 15 more of these on each side. Think of this as a single project or program. And then you can see obviously how the complexity certainly is magnified and there's no shortage of challenges to putting in place an effective governance model and processes and practices. And that's, you know, we're just talking about the challenges here and you don't see cost anywhere up on here, right? And being sure that we're governing the right things and it gets back to the theme of it shouldn't just be governance, shouldn't just be about following a process. But the cost of governance can be really high. And certainly for those folks that have been involved in the creation or implementation of governance processes and practices, that's, you know, frequently amongst the first things to go unless there's obviously there's some federal oversight on the governance model and you have to go through some separate process to claim compliance with it. There's a lot of implications that, you know, again, the idea of per project or per program are magnified and if you're just doing it for the sake of doing the process, then most likely you're not governing the right things. I think a really good example of that is looking at the recession, right? So certainly the pace of business and technology change, the rate of change was very, very significant, right? So the creativity on the business side, innovation, trying to come up with new investment vehicles and methods, right, to make more money, to make more revenue for certain companies. That was never held in check in the governance process. So what ended up happening is you had all these new investment vehicles that were created and the governance model didn't change. What was supposed to be in governed didn't make any adaptations. It was about, you know, following a checkbox governance model that missed sort of the meaning and the purpose of why it was there, why it was implemented to begin with. Governance became the process, right? And that was obviously a big problem since we can look back on it and say, yeah, well, they certainly weren't measuring the right things and they ignored the problem that they were, you know, basically supposed to be solving. And when you don't, you know, if you're not focused on the problem, you don't understand what the problem is. You ignore the data in the metrics aspect so you can't measure it. And in my opinion, you know, the number one issue really is not having a common and concrete understanding of what problem you're trying to solve. So this is, again, another aspect of the alignment. And I think that, you know, you have to put the problem in context of your business, right, in order to make it meaningful so that people can get behind it and they can understand what their impact is and why you need it. Certainly having the correct representation of anyone who's been involved in the governance process knows that frequently they become very large, very cumbersome. And there's a lot of people who you can, you know, a lot of meetings and you're kind of looking around at meetings and saying, yeah, I wonder what those people are here. I wonder what one of those other people are here. I think that's a pretty common issue that happens with governance. Frequently there do need to be, you know, many stakeholders involved. But I think that more than half the time in my experiences, it could have been a little bit smaller of a group of stakeholders for sure and probably would have helped it be more successful or at least be a little bit more agile and rapid. When you define the business problem, obviously, you know, if you're starting a business of your own tomorrow and you're sort of your mission and vision is, yep, we're going to go make money, that's not going to be very effective and you're probably going to have a pretty hard time being successful unless perhaps you're a bank robber or something like that. I guess that's fairly straightforward. But if you don't, you know, if you have something super high level as sort of your problem statement, and it's not really action oriented, that's going to be difficult to sort of get the wheels in motion and figure out how exactly, who needs to do what, what the game plan is going to be. It's very important to make that actionable. And sometimes that means you have to decompose your problem statements, even, you know, two or three different layers to find out what are those things that need to be put in place, just like you would with a business plan, right? So maybe you start your business plan with, sure, we want to be profitable, we're going to make money. But then you've got to ask, okay, how are you going to do that? Why are you going to do that? And then each one of those answers then starts to decompose that problem statement as something that's more meaningful. And then you can start asking, how are you going to do that? So I think that's really important when you're sort of, you're trying to identify what your problem statement is, is question the level at which it is at and be sure that it has meaning for everybody. And then obviously, you know, the idea of being sure that it's aligned. There's a lot of folks, widely varying opinions on this right about, you know, well, you know, in some cases, if your business is, you know, not related at all or you have, take finance as an example, there's a lot of governance around finance that's imposed on it, right? The too big to fail stuff. And, you know, I still believe that there are legitimate business objectives there. Now you can say, well, take the short route and say, well, sure, you're going to then try to market the fact that you're compliant with, you know, such and such, or that you follow, you know, whatever process or something like that. But I think there's, you know, when you start decomposing the problem statements, it's about managing risk, right? It's about optimizing your business. And you need to be sure that you have the right metrics to measure that and the right data to back it up. So I think let's take a quick question here, a quick poll rather. And let's talk, you know, I'm interested in just kind of people reflecting and seeing what the biggest governance challenges are that they face today. So if it fits anywhere, you know, obviously there could be 50 different options to this. I understand that. But, you know, we're trying to pick some of the higher-level ones. I'd be interested in understanding what folks feel are some of their biggest challenges to their governance today. Yeah, I've got the poll open. There's just a few seconds left. So get your answer in. All right. It is closing up. Give me just a second, and I will push the results out for you. Cool. Thanks, Jen. Okay. So all that's happening. So I've mentioned a few times about the data, and this can be a really big challenge. Because you have this clear objective. Let's just go ahead and say that, okay, you're in agreement on it with all of the, you've identified the stakeholders. You know who's doing what. You know, you have it boiled down as far as executable chunks. But you've got to measure those. You have to understand how you're going to make progress against those. So I'm sorry, I'm cheating here. I'm taking a look at the poll. So objective. Yeah, unclear objectives is a little bit out in front. That's good. Sorry, I don't mean that's good for the people that suffer from that. But I certainly mean that, you know, looking at the numbers and seeing the process is too slow. That's really common. And frequently when the process doesn't change, it becomes bureaucratic. It's really hard to get people's buy-in to follow it. And so it becomes an obstacle instead of being an incentive. I completely understand that. I'm clear objective. I just completely understand that one. Not aligned to the business. Yeah, that's a big problem too. So, okay, that's great. So thanks for that. Okay, so talking about the data a little bit. And I think that this is, you know, too often we end up following a process. And then when step one, check mark, then you go on. Step two, check mark, and you go on. And great. So you've gotten a bunch of check marks. You followed your process. But, you know, is it to your objective? So let's go ahead and say, okay, we have our objective. It's boiled down. It's actionable. We're executing it. And, you know, we're feeling great because we think that that's the stuff that we're measuring. We have metrics tied to it. But you need to be really careful about the data. If folks are familiar, there's a couple of interesting similar patterns here. One was data warehouses from, you know, about a decade ago. That's since been repeated with big data in data lakes, which is, you know, yeah, the amount of data is huge, and especially with what's going on now in various markets, it's increasing rapidly. Look at what's happening in IoT or IOE. Every device, every connected thing is spewing data. What do we do with it, right? So the old data warehouse or new data lakes were just these big storage lockers for all this data. And a lot of folks said, you know, just leave it there, and then we'll make sense of it later. So that's great if you're a data scientist, right? When you're running a business, perhaps not so much, you need answers right away. You know, something that I have found to be a basic truth is that if you take a single set of data, right, it's completely identical, and you give to five different people, depending on their perspective and how they want to look at it, they're going to come up answering very similar if not the same questions with five different answers, right? So that's a problem that you get into by not having structure around your metric and not having sort of a pre-agreed, okay, here's our metric, here's how we're going to measure it. These are the attributes. That's how you have to go into it. You can't come after it sort of or add it after the fact, right? You get all this data, and then it's like throwing chicken bones down and you say, okay, what's it telling us? Very important that this mapping, this hierarchy, your business objective, then the metrics, then the data, that that hierarchy is retained. So there's also, you know, sometimes people think of metrics as data, but it's very important that a metric can have several different data attributes or components to it that it rolls up because that can be more meaningful attention or times to the business. And one of the things that I would give as an example is you have some amount of data over time, right? So it's potentially two attributes or even more than that, but it's some combination of things over time that you can then show trending to. Because, you know, without that, you have no idea if your model is actually working, right? And it's very important. A lot of those checks that people put in, I would sort of call those more milestones in your process versus actual metrics of how you're measuring your governance, right? You may have milestones to the governance process. It's through this gate, that gate, control gates like CMM and things like that have. But it's not measuring the effectiveness of your governance model. So as an example, when we talk about what happens if you don't have the right data. So these numbers obviously are applicable to projects. But, you know, essentially having no data or bad data, impact projects that we're looking at here, it certainly serves as a good example to the impact to governance, right? So probably a little bit telling finding numbers for actual governance, like meaningful governance processes and effectiveness is pretty difficult. But if you think about good processes, look at a software development lifecycle, you don't have any business process. You're going to want to adopt some kind of a continuous improvement cycle to it. So if you don't have data, if you're not measuring essentially the effectiveness and not just adherence to the process, then how do you become, you know, how do you continue to improve upon that? How do you ensure that it's meeting the objectives and the business goals that was originally implemented to do? So, you know, everyone's been through, or I think, you know, these numbers just kind of make sense, right? We know that, you know, there's a high failure rate in IT projects where I would say development projects. And if you're a developer, there certainly is the, you know, you feel pretty lucky if half of the projects you've worked on actually ever see the light of day. So, you know, I mean, these numbers sort of speak for themselves in that sense. And just to draw the complete analogy, obviously there are some good projects and programs that develop software products and follow a software development lifecycle, and they may check the fact that, you know, they had a business requirements document, and they had a design artifact, and they went through, you know, their development or construction phase, and then it went through QA and all these things, and you can measure the fact that it went through those stages of the process, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you kept in mind, you know, why are you building that product to begin with? What's the business objective? What are you trying to solve for? So, you know, there's, well, you take a look at this slide and say, yep, communication alignment. That's really telling. That's epiphany for me. Thanks so much for sharing that today. But I want to talk a little bit about, you know, these two principles, more than anything else in effective governance, really rise to the top. Because I think that, you know, again, the overall theme of alignment, and obviously there's the alignment of, you know, stakeholders, and there's the communication aspect. But the important here that I want to draw out is that communication needs to happen in terms of the business. Right? It's very, very important. If your communication around governance is talking only about steps or stages in the process, that should be a big red flag. Right? Because without that level of communication, you can't get alignment. What's going to happen is, you know, similar to the polling question, people are going to see the governance model as a hindrance. Right? And they're going to do a lot of work to make your job difficult in implementing it and circumventing it whenever they can. Because it's, you know, kind of like the, you know, in a lot of cop shows and whatnot, you have internal affairs. Not really liked or loved by internal to the police squad. But, you know, they're necessary. So governance is necessary. We have to show certain organizations or, you know, compliance to different governance models. But it doesn't need to be an obstacle. Right? It doesn't need to seemingly go against the grain of the business. So the, you know, and I mentioned earlier, the alignment is at multiple layers. So it's not just between lines of business, although that's imperative, right? So you have business and technology. You know, obviously you have to, if it is a separate governance group, whoever's, you know, sort of running that or the lead for that effort, it's very important that everyone understands what the objectives are and that they're the right objectives. So, again, back to the business context and back to being sure that you're trying to measure the right things according to the governance model that you've put in place. And really important here, the right stakeholders. So if you look at, you know, a simple picture, right? This is basically saying, yeah, it's a balance, right? That that's what effective governance is. So it's successfully balancing, having the right stakeholders, being sure that those business terms are aligned or the objectives, I'm sorry, are in business terms and aligned to the strategy. It's an action-oriented plan in a process to achieve that and align teams. That's it. And what's really important here is that there is a balance of having enough governance. And I think that this is also a fairly big problem that a lot of governance efforts or initiatives face, which is, you know, if you look at this, the pyramid here, and you have these different levels, agility, business agility on the left, governance on the right, and these different levels of essentially governance in the middle. There's a cost to this. So to have effective governance, high effectiveness and, you know, high business agility, maybe you need optimized governance. But maybe you don't. If folks are familiar with what CMM is and the various levels of CMM, I remember back, it had to be early 90s, when CMM was becoming a really big deal, right? And there was a lot of groups that just went gung-ho at it and they said, ah, that's what we're going to do. We're going to be the best. We'll be, you know, CMM compliant, superstars, blah, blah, blah. So there was a lot of money spent on that. And then after three, four, five years, companies kind of realized, well, you know what? This isn't really our product. We're spending a ton of money on this. And so maybe we don't need to be the ultimate CMM-certified superstars. So they kind of right-sized their governance model. And I think that's really important that, you know, if you come out, if you follow a process, if you're not asking, you know, why are we doing this? What are our business objectives? It's really hard to sort of say, okay, well then, you know, we should probably only do A, B, and C as far as governance goes. If you know what your business objectives are and your governance is aligned to the strategy and the stakeholder and the strategic conversations that happen, then I think it becomes a lot easier to talk about what's enough governance. Because, you know, we shouldn't blindly walk in everything saying, you know, we have to, you know, governance is our career. This is just what we're going to have to do for the next 20, 30, 40 years, whatever it is. And obviously, in this picture, you know, this is very subjective. There's no real metric for levels of governance. And obviously that I'm implying here, obviously governance methodologies and processes and frameworks do have different levels. But there's two important aspects, I think, to figuring out, you know, how much governance you need. One of it, and this is obviously being cost-driven. But if you look at this, make up your own criteria and ask yourself, where am I today, current state? And then most importantly, where do you need to be? Right? So it doesn't necessarily have to be at the top. And there's varying levels. This picture would probably be skewed of, you know, you might have a highly effective governance that's very lightweight and still have some business agility. So it might not be a straight line across there. It might be curved a little bit. But that's, I think, a great starting point to assess, you know, instead of coming out saying, you know, this is, let's not question how much we need. We're just going to do it for a certain period of time. Be sure that you understand how far you have to go, right? What are you trying to govern and what's needed? And it's important to understand the cost aspect of that, too. So two more questions we're going to have back to back here. So I want to get people thinking a little bit about, you know, how would you assess your current state around governance and business alignment specifically? So for these, you know, do you think that it's as good as it can be optimized? Or do you think it's slightly below that, which is kind of a responsive model or reactive or disciplined, or is it just chaotic? So again, this is very subjective. You know, take your own, make up your own criteria for this. But again, for the alignment aspect, I think some of the things that I would be thinking about are, you know, do you know what the business strategy is? Can you say, you know, the governance model that's in place or needs to be putting in place or trying to put in place is well aligned to that? Are the governance people stakeholders in the business strategy? Are those conversations, you know, two-way? Are they happening frequently? All that kind of stuff. All right. Jay, the poll is closing, and I'm just waiting for the results to come together, and then I will push the results out for this first question. Cool. Can I go on, Shannon, to the next question, or will it mess you up? Well, let's, here, let me push out the results for you first, and there we go for the first one. Oh, man, no one's optimized. Okay. Cool. And I'm taking some notes here because I want to compare this to the next slide. Absolutely. That's great. So, on discipline two. Okay. All right. Ready for the next one? Yeah, so that's great. So, no one is optimized. Okay. So, now I think what I wanted to do is show a little bit of a delta here. So, answer this question, right, which is where do you think you want to get to? And I'd ask yourself specifically, like, do you really think that optimized is your end state? And let's see what some of the answers to this guy are. The poll is open. Got lots of people answering just a few more seconds. It'll remain open, and then we'll close it up. Looks like responsive, and then second is optimized, but we'll see what the final results are. All right. It's closed. Next is compiling the results. I do any jeopardy music for these moments, Jay. You really do, because no one wants to hear me sing. That's for sure. Okay. There you go. There are the results. Nice. Okay. So, that's really surprising to me, right? So, a lot of folks went to optimized, and wow, that's a big flip. So, that's cool. Yeah, so maybe you're asking yourself, do we need to be optimized? Obviously, it depends on what you're trying to govern, what the model is that you're trying to put in place. But that's very telling. I do like the fact that a lot of people are just below the max, though, too. So, that's our biggest getter. That's fantastic, and I think that's really important. And I don't want to sell this point short that I've been in several situations where I've had to basically make the business case for not being at the top. And it was incredibly painful because I had to come up with a cost model, and I had to say, look, we can do that. Here's what it's going to cost us time-wise, resource-wise, everything else. And it was a very large number. Or we can come just under that, and then this is what our cost would be. And that implementing governance was not our product, right? But it was very important. I completely understood that. But that's the whole thing about rightsizing, is you have to figure out how much can you afford. In a lot of cases, what's in the best interest of your customers? If you get 80% of the benefit for going to basically one level down from the top, then that's pretty good. If being responsive is good enough, then that's where you should focus first. And there's no reason why you can't do one and then move to the other, either, right? So, frequently, this would be you don't create a plan out of the gate to go, oh, we're going to go from undisciplined to optimized in three years. What you might want to do is say, look, let's create a sort of a work breakdown structural, much higher level plan to get from undisciplined to responsive. And then let's put our metrics in place. And what this means is it wouldn't just be metrics to how to get to responsive, but you have to have metrics to say, once we get to responsive, is that good enough, right? And so it's a totally different set of data, perhaps, that you'd be looking at saying, are we, hypothetically, let's say that we're trying to manage risk and optimize cost. Are we showing results in those two areas and those two business objectives at being responsive, right? And can we model out what more optimized would get us? It's definitely a, it's a thinking game, right? It has to, you have to take a very sort of design thinking approach to it. That's the aspect that I really like. And too often, you know, if someone comes up and they have a process and they're like, God, this is what we're going to do. This means that we'll be compliant in this governance model and blah, blah, blah, right? So I'll take a few minutes now and talk about a specific case study, and this is probably not going to be unfamiliar territory to many of you. But, you know, I've hinted a few times at essentially business objectives of minimizing risk. In this case, it was being out of compliance with software, basically with asset licensing and trying to optimize asset spend. And I'll, you know, I'll do this example and try to highlight, you know, some of the issues that we had, and then, you know, essentially what the solution was and how we got around to it. So if you look at this picture, the user is in the center there with the exclamation point, right? And basically in order for them to get an asset, a software or hardware asset, they had to go and they had to put an enterprise architecture to get it approved. And they had to go to an asset management team to be sure that it was registered, had an asset tag, and then they would go to procurement, right? So you're the user in this scenario. And you have at least three significant steps that you have to do in order to get tools that you need to be able to do your job on a daily basis. So this was not, you know, the concept of a carrot never existed. It was all about a stick, right? It was all punitive. So it's a really hard position to put the users in place or in charge, I guess, of governance here because if you're a user, you know, I don't care for instance, I have to do my day job, right? I need to get the stuff that I need, the tools that I need to be able to do my day job. And this was making it very, very difficult. And then around the outside of this, you know, you have enterprise architecture standards process where they have a strategy for the technology stack. And they might come up with something on the left-hand side that says, aha, this is the direction that we're going to go. It's all about widgets, right? And they're trying to enforce widgets, but there's no communication going on with the asset management team or supply chain team, right? So they're saying, I don't know, don't know what a widget is. What I care about is I put an asset tag on this thing. What supply chain cares about is it's something that's audible for them, right? And they can track it from, you know, basically put it on a PO and then asset management, it's their job to reconcile those things that are out in the wild versus the PO. And it was back and forth and back and forth. And then there was, you know, a small army of folks whose job was unfortunately for them to manage this reconciliation process. So they had to do everything from physically logging on to machines. And from a governance aspect, you know, EA had a governance model, right, around their standards in enforcing the standards. Asset management had a governance model to be sure that essentially that the right assets were being used, that we were, you know, this is the risk mitigation part, that, you know, we were only licensed for the things that were being used and then, you know, then there's the optimization side, which is, okay, for the things that we're not using, how do we optimize that? And then there's the supply chain side. And they definitely had governance around them. How much we're spending? What are we spending on in categorizing spending? So, you know, there were a lot of issues with this model. And, you know, in addition to, you know, it's not fair to put the years in the middle and no one was thinking about a carrot and how to make this better. Each group only cared about their own part, right? So they each had some aspect of governance that they put together. But the objectives of minimizing risk, right, and optimizing asset expenditures, that's an enterprise-wide objective. So they can't be effectively measured just within each individual group's governance model, right, in what they're trying to achieve here. And that overall, you know, sort of overarching, how do we put these things together to answer the real problem was completely missing. So, you know, when you take what was here, what I've just explained, you know, there's nothing from an executable objective standpoint that could be done because there was no visibility across the business. So you didn't have, at the enterprise level, business objectives that were decomposed and something that was actionable. You didn't have metrics to measure those, again, at a higher level. And quite frankly, when each of those business objectives were happening in pockets, there was a whole lot of room for improvement to that. So what had been happening was by creating or putting in place a single system of record for the data, right? So it was basically creating a single common product catalog because what happens is enterprise architecture can use their governance standards process from, you know, basically the data from that same product catalog that drives that process, would drive out the asset management process, and then drives procurement and contracts. This is a bit sort of reverse engineering, if you will, when you put that level of data into your center, okay, they're each doing their own thing. But here's how we're going to provide, you decompose, you find what the metrics are. We started with the objective, we found the metrics and we said, okay, then here's the data. Let's be sure that everyone's using that same product catalog data to do this so that when one person says widget, the other group knows exactly what a widget is, and then the user knows exactly what a widget was. So this solved a lot of the business objectives. It did enable the user. So instead of the governance model and other processes being obstacles, an example is a user could then reference, you know, go through the standard process, reference a product that was in the product catalog, and then asset management and supply chain knew exactly what that thing was also, right? And they knew exactly how to get a hold of it. And so that same notion of that product or that asset could then follow the user through the entire process, that was very meaningful. And not only did that help sort of give the carrot to the user because it ended up streamlined the process, it also helped immensely in the reconciliation process. So previously you might have three different things or three different names for the same thing. Well, it took the human to look at him and say, hey, these might be the same sort of thing with the single product catalog. That was already put in place. So if you notice there are these little dotted lines that go back up the product catalog too. And this was basically stewarding, allowing the stewardship of the product catalog data itself by, you know, basically by enterprise architecture, by asset management, and by the procurement and contracts team. So they could give feedback into that content and then it could be shared across there. So an example of this would be someone goes, the user goes through, they request a certain product, software product, let's say, in the enterprise architecture process. And it says, you know, basically A comes back and they say, nope, we're not going to use that. It's not aligned to our strategy. And so that's essentially the governance model for adhering to the technology strategy right in the roadmap everything that's put in place. So now that record says, nope, we can't use this so asset management knows that. But if the user were then to try to go to supply chain and this frequently happened prior to this process being put in place, that they would have, you know, okay, sure, you want this. Yeah, well, go ahead, you got budget for it. And so we'll go ahead and we'll get it for you. And then again, to earlier in our conversation here, those things grow, you know, the governance of the technology strategy, the governance model from enterprise architecture grows very sort of separately or it grows a skew essentially from, you know, the ability in the process then from supply chain, their model is simply, you know, check the budget, they have it then go. And then when you come back to it, you know, the cost factors aside, you know, if people are calling things by different names from an asset management perspective, you have, it's very, very difficult to reconcile those. So by providing that product catalog and giving, you know, essentially all groups that come in language, there's huge value in that. There's a, one more step to this too. If you notice, the user still had sort of three separate groups and processes to get engaged with and go and do. So the future state for the solution basically is to add, you know, essentially a user portal request portal on top of that. So, you know, that was, you know, one more thing in streamlining and focusing on the carrot, how can we get better adoption? How can this become easier for the user and still facilitate all of the governance aspects that we need to be measuring and monitoring and putting in place. So, you know, the process from a governance perspective, we're not talking about check boxes here anymore, right? It's all driven by metrics that are substantiated by data and everyone has input into what that is. So every stakeholder that's in this, you know, basically engaged in this process is very much vested in it. And, you know, the nice thing is about these little red, the red rectangles there is that you still have some autonomy for those lines of, line of businesses to do their job and not be impacted, which is really important. Because, you know, anytime you come in with a, whether it's an overall methodology, whether it's a governance practice or process or anything like that, you can't, to be successful, you cannot come in with one size fits all attitude. It's not going to work. And this was a really big issue in this implementation, was that everyone had their own processes. They had been working fine for them, right? Not for the enterprise. And you could have come in with a mandate and say, hey, you're all going to use this. But I was the one that was trying to sell this solution across all these different lines of business and what I had to be able to do was tell them, you know what, what you guys are doing today, we're not going to impact that. But here's how, you know, you're going to be pulling your data from somewhere else. We're going to use this common data, this common language to enable this overall process, blah, blah, blah, right? So it was a very good selling point. I think that, you know, that's an important note for, you know, if you're implementing a governance model, you really need to focus on carrots because governance has a bad rap as being bureaucratic, as being, you know, not the product, just kind of a pain. If you can work on ways identify what those carrots are for each stakeholder, get them vested in making it successful. Very, very important. So in a nutshell, and I think I've touched on most of these points already, out of this case study, you know, people were so afraid, hey, you're going to have a single process now for, you know, basically asset requests and procurement and fulfillment and all this stuff, it's going to take forever. In actuality, the process went from two to three months down to two to three days. So having that common language, that common data set, actually enabled technology teams to automate most of their processes, which was huge. The other big concern was, this is going to be stifling. If I need to go, you know, I need to be innovative because I'm a developer, right? And so, you know, I can't wait around and put a request in and wait for a week and get my stuff in. I need it now. We were actually able to do that. So in the data that existed within Technopedia, you look at it, there's a bunch of categories there. So a developer would come in. They'd say, hey, you know what? I need a new analytics tool or, you know, BI tool, something like that. They could look at the best of breeds, all the best of breeds solutions, right? Then we had a lab process that they could put their requested product in and go and kick the tires on it. So, you know, something else I think that's important from that aspect and from a governance perspective is that you know you're going to have exceptions. Build those steps into your process early. Don't leave, you know, the opportunities and sort of just say, nope, this is exactly the process. You can never deviate from it. I mean, there's a balancing act there. You know there's going to be exceptions. You have to be able to facilitate that. Don't build a bunch of, you know, huge walls around the process. People are going to figure out a way to go around it. So be sure that you give those exceptions the correct process. So I mentioned the labs. This is very important for us because we had labs where people, they were completely undiscovered. People would go through whatever they want to and they didn't care about, you know, basically the risk imposed to the company. So, you know, by creating basically this lab innovation process, it was an exception process to get, you know, new software products rapidly and then an environment, you kind of create, you know, what they call in security scenarios a honeypot, right? It's where everyone goes, but at least it's visible. It's a much better approach than sort of forcing everybody around, around, you know, end around basically around the process. So these are the points I've mentioned already. And, you know, I just want to reiterate this, you know, this needs to happen now, right? If you look at the industry and what's going on, you know, it's not about following a process. If you just follow the process, you'll achieve some value initially, but then as these things grow apart, you're going to get left behind and you're going to become a liability for the business. So, you know, you have to look where things are going and see with the added complexity and the amount of data and stuff that's happening, especially, you know, look at IoT, look at IOE, look at in the medical community, even if, you know, if you're wearing, you know, some kind of a smart watch or a health monitor. So if you don't use the application that came with it to upload your data or if you're using a really significant, you know, sort of super one where that data is going to your doctor or to your insurance company or health care provider. You know, that's all data that has to be governed, especially in the health area. It's very, very important. So we want to be sure that we're making changes now towards effective governance. You know, I talked about health and medical, which is obviously a big area, but, you know, just for current events. So obviously, the folks that are aware of what's happened in Pittsburgh over the past two weeks is that there are now autonomous cars on the streets of Pittsburgh that you can call up Uber and the car will show up. And I think last week, it might be this week also, there's actually, there's a, they're not in the driver's seat, they're in the passenger seat, but there is someone in there and they have this big red emergency button to kill, I think, all the systems. But look at these pictures. So if you look, from a user's perspective, this is one thing, right? It's an Uber car, it's an autonomous driving car that you're going to go ahead and you're going to call up and it's going to take you somewhere. Great, that's the service that it's going to provide. But think about it from a governance perspective. So think about government, you know, sort of traffic, highway safety and transportation groups, insurance companies, sensor manufacturers, auto manufacturers, software vendors, and on and on and on. There has to be governance, not just in those individual pockets, although those will exist also. This whole, you know, if you're the user, the whole thing is an asset, right, you're going to have governance applied to it. But then there's all these different aspects to it, they're also going to have governance applied to it. So what's happened, what happens when there's a whole fleet of these cars out there and there's a safety recall? So just think about that from a governance perspective, if, you know, they have a governance model to follow, if it's a checkbox process, that's going to be a really ugly scenario and how do those things interrelate? So with the safety recall, say it's on the tires, right? So hypothetically, they're Michelin tires, you know, doesn't, you know, so what happens to the sensor manufacturer if that has to get recalled and have the tires changed? You know, what if it doesn't happen, it doesn't get those tires changed? What's the impact to insurance companies? So I just wanted to leave you sort of with that thought, really about the complexities of what's happening in the world and why it's so important that we get, you know, effective governance models in place. And just to kind of revisit the takeaways, I told you I'd make you sick with repeating these, but, you know, very, very important, identify what the problem is, right, and be sure that you have decomposed or composed, right, rolled up or rolled down to the proper level, what the objectives are, that those need to be driven by metrics, and that you have to have data to verify them, right? Very important, governance models should be, should have continuous improvement loops in them. You can't do that without the data. You can't measure it. And be sure that governance understands what the business strategy is. Don't expect to be invited to the meeting and ask, you know, what, how can governance help? How can it be a catalyst to achieving the business strategy? It's probably not at the top of the business strategy presently, but I think some good creative thought will get it there, and obviously the time is now. So I appreciate everyone hanging on and listening, and I think with that, let's January to open it up to Q&A. Absolutely. I just to answer one of the most common questions that we receive, I will be sending a follow-up email with the two business days with links to the slides and links to the recording of the session to all registrants by end of day Thursday. So a couple of questions are coming in, and just submit your questions in the Q&A in the bottom right-hand corner. You know, the first question, I didn't catch it fast enough to see which slide was referenced to, but in reference to when you were talking about accountability, I'd like to see that last question correlated with industry. I'm in government, and we have a high level of accountability. Sorry, so I'm not understanding exactly what the question is that. They want to see how accountability relates to industry? Yeah. Okay. How accountability relates to industry? Well, I think that accountability, regardless of what the industry is, accountability aspect has to be built into the governance model. And if I'm not getting the right question, I apologize. But unquestionably, when you have stakeholders, that's where accountability starts. So diagnosed, you know, when you're going through that process of saying, here's what the business objective is, here's how we're going to make that action, blah, blah, blah, blah, here's my stakeholders. Those stakeholders have to come away from that understanding that they have skin in the game. That's why you have to keep that, you know, the right sizing, not just the level of governance, but also right sizing the stakeholder group. The larger you make those groups, the more problematic it's going to become, the less agile the group is going to become. So that's very troubling. If they don't have skin in the game, right, and they don't have accountability, you know, whether your process is to make a racee diagram or anything like that, you really have to question why they're there. Because they're, you know, I mean, I've been in painful, you know, just scheduling a recurring meeting is, you know, basically it takes an act of God, right, just to get calendars to align and have some kind of recurring scheduled meeting. So I would say, again, if I'm understanding the question correctly, it has nothing, accountability, you know, doesn't have much to do with the industry unless you're rolling it up and you look at that, you know, like the autonomous car example. But if you're talking about accountability from the group driving governance, that has to be taken into consideration and a racee diagram is one way to do that when you identify who your stakeholders are. Yeah, and the question that goes on to explain that with regards to the polling about the level of governance optimized to chaos is what they were specifically referring to. Okay, well, yeah. Yeah, so sorry. I might have missed a little bit of that, right? I think that's... Yeah. So, again, but there's several different layers of accountability even to that, right? So when you go to, you know, when you're optimized or down to response or reactive on discipline and chaos, you have no accountability if you're following a process, right? If you're just sort of checking the checkboxes and say, yep, we did step one, yep, we did step two, yep, we did step three, this still gets back to the stakeholders, right? Being sure that who's accountable for the correct level of governance has to be a question that you have or a question that's asked early on, right? Where do we want to go and what does each one of those mean to us? So if your business objectives, if you outline, you know, you have two or three different business objectives, you decompose those things into actionable, you know, they're higher than a task level, but they're actionable, you know, directional things that your statements, you're making that you're going to go and do that you can measure, right, with some kind of metric. So you have to, at that point, you know, for the accountability aspect, you have to be sure you have those right stakeholders involved and then drive it from that way. And I think everyone has to, you know, part of the alignment is getting sure that people understand, here's where we are today, you know, try to get agreement or some kind of consensus on it. Here's where we want to go, right? And you may have some different voices there, but I think everyone has to agree to what the, at least that first measurement's going to be. The next question coming in is, the questioner says, I'm working on a project and I don't think it's in line with the business objectives of the organization. What would you do in my shoes to validate my assumptions? Should all projects fall within the governance plan? No, I don't think that all projects should fall within the governance plan. I think that, you know, what you want to do, what will end up happening is your governance model will become a Swiss Army knife, right, and it's going to lose its effectiveness and it's just going to become a process, if that's the case. So I would pick, you know, I think there's a lot of different ways to approach it. You could boil it out to, you know, you prioritize projects just like you prioritize requirements for a given project based on who the customer is, you know, whether it's the core competency or not, a sense of urgency based on business criteria, blah, blah, blah. I mean, you can, there's a million different models that you can make up to be able to do that. Everybody should have absolute right to question what it is that you're doing and how it relates to a given project, right? I would, you know, if it's an environment that doesn't allow you to do that, that's sort of a different, much larger problem. But everyone should be asking that, right? Don't just sort of, you know, say, oh, well, this is what I do and here's our process, so I'm going to follow that. I think it's a great opportunity and I think that all businesses would very much value the fact of someone asking that question because it's going to perhaps expose risk of the current model and how it's not actually measuring the right thing. I think that that's been proven over and over. The examples I gave certainly of the financial crisis is that I think that's one of the best ones that I can think of that, you know, sort of really stand out. How does government-solution funding agree across multiple stakeholders? For example, product catalogs. Did you say funding? Yes. Okay. Well, that's going to be highly variable depending on the organization and the company that's doing it and whether, you know, normally, you know, most companies, I would say, I'm sure there's a lot of exceptions. You know, everything from OPEX, CAPEX models to, you know, who the primary stakeholder, if someone has to be, look at reference data within investment banks as an example, well, it's the arm of the investment bank that has to pay for governance and has to be able to fund it. That's absolute because they're the ones that are going to be audited on that stuff. So that's going to widely vary depending on, you know, what the project is, who's the sponsor for it. If it's corporate, then, you know, it perhaps comes from the same budget and maybe your company is large enough to have a dedicated governance and risk group. I know there are several of those that exist. They have their own budgets that I've been exposed to. So, sorry, not a great answer, but, you know, there's a wide variability to that. Yeah, we could probably have a whole webinar just on that question. Yeah, I think so. Perhaps this person asked, oh, so, so the questioner is referring back to the first question and just kind of going a little bit deeper, whether or not certain industries are more governed than others. And if so, why and how do you up the accountability in a specific industry? Yeah, so, unquestionably, there are and certainly using the example from the recession, and I have a lot of metal scars from being in financial tech companies or fintech companies, but unquestionably, the level of governance and scrutiny is much, much higher. And it's really hard in those companies when you're involved in those projects or programs to really think of them as, you know, what's the business benefit to this? What's our business objectives? You're saying, well, no, we have to check a box for the government, right, because we're going to get audited and blah, blah, blah. But you still, you have to take a stance of saying, okay, well, unquestionably, looking at what a lot of people, the price that they had to pay from the recession, there's a completely legitimate aspect to minimizing risk for our customers, and certainly you want to provide the best products possible. From an accountability perspective, we're, you know, bringing that back again, the accountability is, you know, it has to be, the accountability has to be to the overall team. The accountability certainly is not just to the governance people because then you just get into the internal affairs model and it's going to be completely, no one's going to cooperate. You're going to spend a ton of money to get very little return, right? And that model is fairly common, but very, very broken. So, you know, internally the accountability has to be determined by the stakeholders. So, you know, you need to be sure that you're mapping the correct stakeholders to your bin's objectives. And the accountability for achieving, and, you know, again, achieving, you're accomplishing something through your governance model. So that's what the end result is what you're achieving. The adherence and compliance to that is in large part been given historically just to the governance people, right? It's their fault if you're not compliant, blah, blah, blah. So I don't buy that. I think that, again, that's sort of the pitting internal groups against each other. This is why I think it has to be mapped to the business strategy overall. So just like you have technology teams or groups, along with business groups, governance has to be part of the same conversation, right? So if governance, if you look at something and you have a project, the business comes back and says, hey, let's make some widgets. And the technology team says, okay, great. Here's what we can do to help out that. The business is going to take care of the marketing aspects and other things like that. Putting those two things together, if that fails, well then certainly it's both the shared opportunity to fail by both the business and technology team. So you add governance in that and it's the exact same relationships. There's different roles, responsibilities for it, but success or failure is shared in accountability. Fabulous. We've got a few more minutes. How important is it to include internal risk and compliance in your governance process? Significant, right? So I think internal risk and compliance in a lot of groups that I'm aware of, they're the same folks that have other or that oversee other governance aspects. And so they'll have some governance models of their own and they have slightly different business objectives that are driving those. But in large part and something else to be aware of is that when those risk and compliance groups, again, if you take this, I really propose the exact same approach, right? So risk, if you're minimizing risk for your end customers or minimizing risk to a certain group within the company, which results in faster time to market of products and things like that, right? That's the level of business of the highest level business objective that you want to try to get to. So when you look down from that, if we can, when you're questioning what the business objectives are, understand, okay, maybe if I have a risk and compliance group that has a set or one or two governance requirements or governance models that we need to apply. And then if you're in a large enterprise, maybe there's an enterprise architecture group that has some other ones, maybe there's somebody else. You should take inventory of what those are and see if by chance that they can be combined with all the simplifying, because the more layers of that complexity that you have, I guarantee you there is a direct impact, your time to market, and unquestionably from customer support and everything else, you are losing a significant amount of agility with every aspect or layer of complexity that you're adding. So I think that, again, I'm not trying to... I know that it's difficult. I'm not trying to say that it's not by any means or oversimplify the problem. But again, for the sake of the business, if you can look across different groups and look at what the implication or who is expected to follow those models and simplify them, then the business can benefit a great amount. Sure. And would you involve them right away, or what stage of the process should they get involved? I'd involve them right away. I think it's really important that that identification of the stakeholders is really critical from the absolute get-go from the very first step, because they're going to have... It's going to take a while to get agreement, number one. But also then there's the aspect of, well, if you only have certain governance models and that's all you've done and we're proposing perhaps combining them into one thing to lessen the impact and the cost, you might be changing something. You might be coming up with something different and that's going to take some time to do. If you don't involve them unquestionably just from a relationship standpoint, they're going to be much less likely to actually sort of join in the fun, if you will, and collaborate also. Well, perfect timing, Jay. We are just coming up to the top of the hour here. Thank you so much for this fantastic presentation. Thanks to our attendees for being so involved in everything we do and asking such great questions. We just love it. Just a reminder again, I also sent a follow-up email within two business days with links to the slides, links to the recording of the session and any additional information that you guys request. Send my way. And thanks to BDNA for sponsoring today's webinar. I hope everyone has a great day. Thank you all so much for the time. Appreciate it.