Business Process Governance Is Your Foundation for Sustainable Operational Excellence

Discover the critical role of business process governance in modern organizations. We examine why formalized process governance frameworks and business process management software are essential for maintaining process integrity, driving continuous improvement, and enabling business transformation.

In brief:

• Business process governance is essential for achieving sustainable operational excellence because it prevents process inconsistency, inefficiency, and misalignment with business strategy.
• A formalized governance framework aligns people, processes and technology by establishing clear standards, ownership roles, and change management practices.
• Effective business process governance relies on three key elements — people, process and technology — to drive compliance, quality, and successful transformation initiatives.

If your organization aims for long-term operational excellence, business process governance must be its starting point. Without it, your processes risk becoming inconsistent, outdated, and disconnected from your business strategy, leading to inefficiencies, rising costs and stalled transformation efforts.

A formalized business process governance framework aligns your people, processes and technologies by establishing clear standards, ownership roles, and change management practices. It ensures process documentation is consistent, accessible, and up to date so you can give your teams the tools to implement improvements confidently and in sync with broader business goals.

Why Business Process Governance Matters

Businesses run on processes. Manufacturing goods, delivering services, paying employees, managing cash flow — these are the lifeblood of every business. Of course, they all must align with each other and with your business objectives for your organization to thrive.

Business process governance establishes and maintains that alignment. It gives you and your process team the rules, standards and strategies they need to efficiently and consistently deploy processes, ensure compliance, determine team member roles and responsibilities, and monitor how well the process is working. With good governance, your process improvement initiatives will be in step with the overarching business strategy for your short- and long-term future.

Without proper business process governance, you risk cascading challenges such as costly errors, declines in quality, dissatisfied customers and a tarnished reputation. You also risk trapping information in inaccessible data silos that can delay and complicate decision-making.

However, these risks may still exist if you haven’t standardized your documentation and enforcement policies. A business process governance framework helps by standardizing your documentation and enforcement policies, ultimately paving the way for future growth, change management initiatives, and a culture of continuous improvement.

3 Key Elements of an Effective Business Process Governance Framework

Successful business process governance frameworks are built on three critical elements: people, process and technology.

Centric Consulting’s People and Change Practice Lead Hilary Lee says, “Only by involving people, process and technology perspectives will your team successfully develop the best solution to implement.”

Let’s take a closer look at each element.

People

All processes — even highly automated ones — start with people. You need leaders to make decisions, lay out the vision and strategy, and monitor implementation. You also need managers to select and deploy consistent processes throughout the company and to supervise modeling and implementing software tools, vendors, process assets, and notation diagramming.

Process

It’s not enough to have processes — or even to document them. You must also implement cycles where you review and update process documentation to keep it current and effective. The resulting feedback loop then provides the data you need to identify best practices, prioritize effectively, maintain consistent roles and more.

Technology

Technology can enable effective process governance. It helps you manage, monitor, and improve processes with solutions such as business process management software (BPMS), process repositories, version control, and document storage solutions. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities within these technologies are transforming the practice of business process governance.

How Business Process Management Software Supports Governance

BPMS enables effective business process governance by automating redundant tasks, creating workflow visualizations, and integrating with other enterprise systems. The result is an unbroken flow of information and processes.

Business process management software also contributes to process documentation in several important ways. BPMS:

• Creates a central process repository where process information and procedures are available for anytime, anywhere access
• Records every process version with details about important changes and their authors
• Establishes version control best practices through automated document management
• Defines and enforces standardized procedures for consistent, predictable task performance

Two good examples of BPMS are Kissflow and ServiceNow. These solutions, and others like them, unlock consistent, predictable and transparent outcomes. They allow every task to be completed using preset rules that make confusion, redundancy and lack of accountability a thing of the past.

Implementing a Scalable Governance Model

When designing a business process governance framework that will scale across your enterprise, follow these best practices:

Understand the Current State

Perform a gap analysis between the existing process governance and your desired end state. This will help you determine what to keep, what to change, and what your milestones should be as you develop long-term goals.

Define Goals and KPIs

In any given process, you have countless data points that you could capture — but the key is to capture the most meaningful by defining your key performance indicators (KPIs). Your current-state analysis will help you see what does and doesn’t matter for tracking progress and measuring success.

Design the Governance Structure and Documentation

Your governance structure must align with your long-term process governance goals. Pay special attention to how your process governance team will interact with the rest of the organization. To avoid conflicts, outline the steps you’ll take to deploy process governance and the tasks and responsibilities of process team members.

Implement Slowly

Pursue a phased implementation of new processes so that team members are comfortable with them and can implement them in an orderly manner. Taking things slowly helps to break down resistance, create learning opportunities, and maintain operational productivity during the transition.

Communicate With and Train Stakeholders

Clearly communicate your expectations to team members to bring them up to speed on new processes, procedures and training opportunities.

Governance Models: Centralized, Decentralized and Hybrid

One common question we hear from clients is: “Should I pursue a centralized approach, where a few people control the governance model? Or should I be more decentralized and let team leads or others make decisions?”

Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks, depending on your situation. A centralized model can speed decision-making, but what if a leader is unavailable at a crucial time? That can bring your governance process to a halt. On the other hand, if you have many decision makers, you will balance greater flexibility against the risk of inconsistency, duplicate efforts, data silos or confusion.

As a result, we have seen many organizations adopt a hybrid, or federated, model. This approach gives team members some process governance responsibilities while assigning ultimate responsibility to one leader or leadership group.

At Centric Consulting, we work with clients to identify the best approach for their unique needs, but the goal for all is the same: to find a model that ensures ongoing governance adoption and engagement across teams.

Measuring and Maintaining Process Governance Success

Earlier, we mentioned the importance of identifying not just KPIs, but the right KPIs for achieving long-term goals. But determining what those right KPIs are requires understanding your business.

For example, a standard measure such as turnaround time — the amount of time needed to go from order to delivery — means something different for a fresh produce or dairy company than a computer manufacturer. Similarly, a small manufacturer of personalized stationery will think of cost per unit differently than a toothbrush manufacturer.

Of course most businesses place high value on certain KPIs across the board. No one wants to see their rate of compliance with regulations and industry standards slip, for example, and most would agree that capacity utilization is important.

Once you’ve identified your most important KPIs, communicate their significance, track them regularly, and post them in an easily accessible place. BPMS and other process management governance tools can help here, too.

Real-World Application of Process Governance

Process governance isn’t a theoretical approach for implementing process-based operational excellence. It’s happening in businesses right now, particularly as a methodology for enabling successful digital transformation, without which no business can innovate, adapt, and thrive, now or in the future.

A successful business process governance implementation can be seen in how we helped a small property and casualty insurance company put a framework in place for their new robotic process automation (RPA) program.

Through online workshops, interviews, and side-by-side work, Centric’s team first identified areas of opportunities with the company’s existing automation, worked with business managers on a process intake system, and prioritized the company’s automation backlog to maximize return on investment (ROI).

We then established governance processes and documents that are now allowing the RPA program coordinator to engage better with business partners, measure ROI, and track the progress of RPA development.

The results were impressive: The company identified 12,000 hours of potential time savings from the automation interviews, increased automation ROI from 20 percent to 100 percent, and created more than 10 governance documents for administration and training. Our client can now obtain approval for additional RPA work more easily and increase engagement with business partners about RPA and innovation.

Build Your Business Process Governance Foundation

Business process governance demands process vigilance, and a process governance framework is a great way to implement the documentation and enforcement policies you need.

Process governance then can become part of your culture. It yields hard benefits, such as lower costs and higher revenue, as well as soft benefits, such as better teamwork, higher employee satisfaction, and lower turnover (benefits you can’t ignore in today’s job market).

Want more information about process governance? Our process experts have plenty of insights on the subject. Check out our governance services page to see for yourself, and Let’s Talk