Insights

Under the Bonnet of a Digitized Boardroom

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By Tim O’Hanlon

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I’d like to share my boardroom governance framework here and then, in future posts, unpack elements of this model that are part of my blueprint called the Integrated Governance Framework (IGF). It is the foundation material I wish to share here and is a specification I have spent years developing and refining from insights gained through large scale transformation initiatives driven at executive level for Global 2000 companies.

 

Retuning to my mission control, cockpit and bridge analogy for boardrooms in my earlier paper, there are some key characteristics that underpin my blueprint that come from what makes these engineered control environments so successful. Boardrooms will continue to lose more and more control of their organisations unless they catch up with automating the business architecture of the boardroom – what I call the Integrated Governance Framework that they govern.

 

I remember a professor I worked with for years, who taught me a lot of what I know today about scenario planning and systemic thinking, used to drill home the cardinal rule that “form always follows function.” What was meant by this is that you must have a solid business architecture in place first before you think about digitizing it. Otherwise, you are going to risk compounding any flaws. It’s when you put the autopilot on that you get to realise just how well the architecture works.

 

I suppose a key question would be: just how much of the time are boards running areas of their operation on autopilot through sheer necessity – think Reg-Tech, Fin-Tech, GRC-Tech, ESG-Tech - and how big a risk is this putting the business under in the long term? How many operating models are there to deal with and how many thousands of variables must be factored in? If the architecture is flawed, the problems are going to compound themselves over time. There has been a siloed approach, certainly since the subprime crisis in my experience, and this lack of systemic thinking means ever growing vicious rather than virtuous cycles manifesting themselves at the boardroom level.

 

How clear is the boardroom view of the systemic relationships across all the operating models and variables that make up all the moving parts under the bonnet of their organisations? Also, I believe it has got to the point where, unless technology is allowed to catch up in the boardroom, there will be more failures in the future that are the unintended consequences of this control creep.

 

Here is the Integrated Governance Framework that I will start unpacking as I take you through each one of the seven pillars over the months ahead. It’s my best view of what I think the business architecture for the boardroom should cover in terms of practices and standards in the various pillars and it then covers the modules for digitization, integration and automation and goes down to the level of wire frame screen layouts to give a sense of the level of granularity needed when thinking about this highly complex area of governance.