Structure in Three: Governance

This week’s research agenda continues on governance and the interfaces of controls with decisions processes for portfolio management.  The further I dive into COBIT 5 the more I like the taxonomy and structure.  While there are gaps, these are explicitly called out in the management guide where research is needed.  Which is interesting as those are the areas I’ve been focused upon, so at some point convergence is likely.  I’ve started to White-Board an assessment tool (MS Access DBMS) which would include COBIT-like concepts yesterday.  As I reverse engineer and rebuild my Access V1 Consultant Workbench (B.A.S.E.) I’ll be adding TIPA & COBIT to the modules I previous built for the platform.  I like using ACCESS more as an intelligence platform that EXCEL due to its ability to build relational models, however, as of late I’m looking at build highbred applications using SharePoint, ACCESS Services and EXCEL.

With more than a few years under my belt in management consulting, methodology and support tools development I have come away with insights on how to make consulting practices more efficient and effective.  B.A.S.E. was developed with that insight in mind years ago.  However at that time management consulting was operated around time & materials billing rather than outcomes, so efficiency and effectiveness in operation was counter to the revenue model.  If it took less time to deliver results to the client you were taking money out of your pocket.  Despite calls for outcome based billing by such notables such as Allan Weiss, Peter Block, and Gerald Weinberg the industry and oddly enough clients still used T&E as the primary billing method.  Which I suppose makes both parties more comfortable and believe easier to contain risk, as time consumption is easier to measure than progress to an outcome.  Just an interesting side-note.

As I continue governance research, the next major area to develop is adoption.  While COBIT 5 describes the change management within implementation, like most other implementation activity very little is defined in this arena.  The majority of efforts listed are on planning the technical rollout and communicating the schedule of such.  From my experience with reengineering processes, such approaches limit effectiveness of change programs.  If left to the end of the lifecycle, stakeholders are suddenly thrust into dealing not only with technological and process aspects but also social and emotional aspects as well.  And as experience has shown experts in the field we continue to ignore, people take longer to change attitudes and behaviors than it takes to implement the technology and define the processes.  The work that John Kotter has accomplished on change management  looks to provide a good base, the next level of development is to move from his strategic framework to create a catalog of tactics and methods to support each stage similar to the business development framework I’ve been recommending to small and medium business colleagues by C.J. Hayden .  End of week I hope to post draft of tactics and methods for adoption stages or find and post a reference by someone else that has already done the research.