Two of the common words I hear from clients, suppliers and as you would expect advisors, is governance and innovation, neither of which is particularly well understood or managed, in my opinion in a vast majority of cases.

All too often governance is simply treated as a review meeting by senior managers, for senior managers. The agenda is all too often focused on SLAs, Quality, Financial status and any significant change requests and the implications of them.

Little consideration is given to the wider business outcomes that the programme is or is not delivering, i.e. strategic alignment between the business and the sourcing strategy, little on the human and learning aspects of the deal, little on relationship management and some lip service given to the idea collaboration.

Important areas in terms of how the relationship can be nurtured, how changes can be made to behaviours and attitudes across the teams to drive better value creation, how devolved decisions can be made across the programme to address business imperatives, whilst satisfying policies, processes and risk appetites and how trust is developed within and between the parties, are all largely ignored, or poorly managed.

Unfortunately, most governance structures consist of formalised meeting schedules, at different levels within the organisation; operational, management and senior leaders. What this does is reinforce the idea that governance is a backward looking function, examining what happened and why, rather than being a forward-looking discipline, which should be about what is happening now and what can be done to improve performance. Governance should be a real time activity, with checks and balances on a periodic basis.

Another unfortunate factor in most governance structures is the segmentation of governance meetings by seniority – an effective class system for organisations. Although on the face of it, this would appear to have some benefits, what it does is hide or disguise the reality on the ground. Disputes, distrust and dysfunctional processes at ground level are never exposed or understood by the senior governance teams, and therefore nothing is done to change behaviours, policies, processes etc to drive performance. The status quo remains, or worse, changes are made with good intentions, which have little chances of making any real difference.

Governance must be an enterprise-wide philosophy; it must seek to remove the silos that exist within and inter-organisations, yet the very silo nature of governance today make this task next to impossible.