Governance and AI Enablement

Good governance ensures your information is trustworthy. Trusted information powers better decision making. Help AI to deliver trusted information.

Now that I’m pivoting as a technical writer to AI Enablement, I thought I’d share some points that may be relevant to businesses that struggle with getting the most out of AI.

First up is having a clear distinction between governance and operations. This distinction is important for you if you are expecting AI to deliver information that is trustworthy.

Example

Here is an everyday example: Driving a car in New Zealand.

Governance

Drive on the left side of the road
Obey speed limits
Drivers must be licensed

Operations

How to start a car
How to adjust mirrors
How to use cruise control

What a crazy state the roads would be in if we didn't have road rules, but even with road rules, nobody expects them to describe how to start a Toyota Corolla.

Question 1: Are your business's policies relevant and consistently applied?

Without good governance, you run the risk of:

people and teams approving their own work
inconsistency in what is being approved and implemented, and
not knowing who to hold accountable.

Actually, it's probably you who is accountable if it's your business, especially if you have not done any due diligence.

Without operational procedures:

people perform tasks differently
mistakes increase in both frequency and magnitude, and
knowledge is lost when staff leave.

Good governance ensures good decisions are the norm.

Clear operational documentation creates confidence that tasks are performed correctly.

Question 2: Is your operational documentation up-to-date?

Enabling AI

If one document says “Product Manager”, another says “Product Owner”, and yet another says “Business Owner”, and they all refer to the same role, you and your existing team may, for the most part, be able to work with this scenario, but new staff will take time to adjust and AI will struggle.

Good governance creates:

trusted terminology that is well defined and consistently applied
trusted ownership of your admin and production processes
trusted compliance with legislation and industry standards, and
trusted alignment within and across all your documents.

This trust dramatically improves AI's ability to deliver content that is grounded in legitimate sources of information. By ensuring your information sources are complete and correct, this reduces AI's tendency to be confidently wrong when trying to fill in the gaps that it finds in your governance and operational documentation.

I’d like to leave you with one more question…

Question 3. Are your governance documents aligned with your operational documents and vice versa?

Want to know more?

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Categories: : AI Enablement, Governance, Operations