As we have come to realize over the course of the last 18 months, the use of AI for sustained resilience is critical, especially when it comes to empowering every team and employee to work with data to improve their business output. CIOs and IT executives are no exception to this, as they aim to become more agile in their decision making, avoid falling behind the competition, and mitigate any operational roadblocks.
However, as Gartner® notes in the “Fix Your Governance Mechanisms for Greater Agility” report, “The digital age requires refocusing governance styles and mechanisms to ensure the right decisions are made effectively. CIOs must recompose traditional enterprise governance mechanisms to become more adaptive.”*
However, that’s easier said than done as organizations — particularly those in highly regulated industries — need to strike the balance between control and agility. For the CIOs aiming to do so, while also ushering their organizations to the next level of digital maturity, Gartner offers four recommendations:
1. “Assess the effectiveness of your adaptive governance to support either control, outcomes, agility, or autonomy-based results.
2. Address the five governance levers (rules, processes, roles, structures, and culture) and their associated mechanisms to redesign and raise the effectiveness of adaptive governance.
3. Inject (new) ways of working into those adaptive governance mechanisms to maintain their effectiveness within the established or target operating model.
4. Look for triggers and enterprise requirement shifts that could invoke a change in decision making capabilities and, therefore, governance mechanisms.”*
*Gartner, Fix Your Governance Mechanisms for Greater Agility, Remi Gulzar, Noah Rosenstein, 24 February 2021.
Governance and Dataiku
At Dataiku, we look at governance as an opportunity to build AI resilience by developing an operational model to let AI grow organically, eliminate silos between teams, and have a high-level view of what is going on. Dataiku enables users to view the projects, models, and resources that are being used and how. We provide model audit documentation to help teams understand what exactly has been deployed, along with full auditability and transferability of everything from access to data to deployment, for each and every project worked on. Teams can easily address fundamental questions such as if their models are aligned with the business objectives and principles and vetting if the models carry any risks for the organization.
One example of an adaptive governance trigger according to Gartner is regulatory changes. Shifting market dynamics like these require CIOs, CTOs, and other executives to ensure they have decision-making capabilities and mechanisms in place that can adapt and scale in order to capture opportunities and avoid PR blunders or drastic project rework. As a supplier of an AI solution, we leave it to our customers to define and develop their own AI frameworks, but we provide the tools and technology to govern AI and comply with upcoming regulation.