Governance Structure for AI

Good governance isn't about more documents. It's about creating and organising trusted information so people can find it and AI can rely on it.

Do you throw everything into one document (policy, standards, processes and procedures), just to get an initiative over the line?

Is all your documentation dumped into one location or worse, spread across a multitude of platforms from records management systems, your computer’s hard drive, one Drive, Sharepoint and Confluence? It may surprise you that some people even edit the documents stored in their emails!

I've seen it all to often, expedience is the driving factor behind the production of poorly structured documents and poorly organised document repositories.

When I once asked to meet with a subject matter expert, I was instead pointed to a mountain of old documentation and told that what I was looking for might be in there! 'Might' being the operative word.

In amongst this documentation were a lot half-finished documents, processes and procedures that were documented that may or may not have been implemented, along with some standards and policy-like statements that were in all probability not signed off.

Using that mountain as a source of truth was problematic. Sure, there 'might' be something in there that represents what currently happens, but I could not use any of it. Except in the minds of a few who knew what to ignore and what to regard as potentially up-to-date information, none of it could be trusted.

To add to this, when people tell you not to bother doing a good job with your documentation because nobody is going to read it, they tend to be the same people who complain about not being able to find the information they need! And if they do find it, they complain about its quality or lack thereof. It’s a self-fulfilling fallacy.

Good governance is about creating:

one place for authority
one place for requirements
one place for processes, and
one place for instructions.

This creates data that:

people can trust, and
AI can draw on to provide reliable responses when asked.

Who are you building your knowledge-base for?

Categories: : AI Enablement, Governance