Good governance provides assurance and confidence that rules are being followed. Who needs that assurance? First, senior management needs to know that its business objectives are being met. If the rules are being followed, there is some assurance the value promised to the business is being delivered. Also, senior management needs to know that the investment the organization has made is being properly managed. Second, regulators look at the governance structure for assurance that risks to shareholders, customers, and the public are being properly managed.

Effective governance embraces QA and QC as part of the culture. By embedding these concepts throughout, the organization promotes awareness and provides evidence of control. This is particularly important to regulators. Regulators want to see controls applied consistently. They want to know that management is aware of problems and that the company does not take shortcuts than can lead to breaking the law. Generally, the more confidence regulators have that a company has strong governance, the less regulatory oversight is used. This is especially true in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services. Failure to have strong governance means less opportunity to expand into new markets. Conversely, good governance means expanded business opportunities.

It’s not unusual to assess the governance process of an organization. These assessments can be either self-assessments, internal audits, or regulatory reviews. For example, operational risk or compliance functions within an organization may perform a review.

The importance of governance is evident in a configuration management process. By controlling system configuration, previously mitigated vulnerabilities remain in check. This results in greater uptime rates. Change management often employs both QA and QC functions. QA governance routines review and approve each change. Whereas the QC function reviews the number of the outages caused by change and tries to improve the record, the QA function benefits from lessons learned. Governance is important to the daily operation of an organization and should not be viewed as an occasional occurrence. Integrating the annual cost of governance into business as usual (BAU) budgets keeps the benefits governance provides from being viewed as an unexpected expense.