Service governance

Service Governance is a discipline for Corporate governance that uses Services to establish an enterprise wide network of services, to enable the monitoring and control of risk, value, and cost. It compliments the General ledger, but, provides a dynamic picture of the economic health of the organisation, through a ITIL/Service Portfolio (but for end-to-end enterprise services, not just for technical or IT services).
Service Governance is designed to deliver the Good Corporate Citizenship that is a major feature of the Comply or explain method of Corporate governance. This method was the major recommendation of the Cadbury Report, as well as the King Report on Corporate Governance.
Service Governance uses existing Best Practice advice, to enable governance of the organisation. The management of the service portfolio, is known as Enterprise service management, in contrast to the more limited management of only the IT services, which is known as IT Service Management.
Service Portfolio
All services described, along with their current performance, in a portfolio of services. This portfolio contains all services in the organisation, including those supplied to the organisation by third parties.
The portfolio provides a map of the organisation that makes it much easier for new Directors to understand the dynamics of the organisation than financial reports, and, thus, easier for the board to make decisions based on accurate, contemporaneous information.
The service portfolio could look something like the one pictured:
Risk
Service Governance ensures that services are designed, individually, to meet the risk requirements of the organisation, according to its risk apetite, on a service by service basis. The control and measures of risk provide real-time integrated reporting to ensure that any deviation from acceptable levels is identified and resolved. The advice, and technical detail of the management of the risk governed is contained in the MoR advice.
Value
Service Governance uses the methods described in Management of Value (MoV)] to discover the requirements of the organisation and to use those to design services, and their measures to deliver those values.
Measurement and Compliance
Well established Best Practice methods are used to design measures and metrics for the organisation. These are designed to meet the requirements of the Corporate Mission, Charter, and Policy. This ensures that they measure what is required by the organisation and, thus, supply accurate real-time information to the board for strategic governance decisions, and to management for operational decisions.
This also ensures compliance with the requirements of Audit as well as enabling the production of the financial and sustainability report and reporting on good corporate citizenship.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu