Governance Consulting Services

Focused on implementing structures and tools to optimize an organizations return on investment in its internal shared services as well as outsourced services. Governance services have both strategic and tactical dimensions and are aimed at assuring consistent best practice management processes throughout that maintain the alignment of service delivery with business need.

TBI Governance Consulting Services provide clients with guidance and assistance in establishing organizational models and processes designed to maintain the alignment between their business needs and service delivery, enhance relationship manageability and optimize service delivery. This includes models and processes that help the client to:

  • Prioritize expenditures and appropriately allocate resources across the organization
  • Evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the clients sourcing solution
  • Gain a clear understanding of customer needs
  • Communicate and coordinate across enterprise and service delivery partners
  • Establish clear roles and responsibility for decision making and service delivery
  • Assure service delivery partner compliance with policies and regulatory requirements
  • Determine the appropriate escalation path for problem resolution

In recent years, as reliance has grown in business on mixed-sourcing strategies for service delivery with multiple vendors and internal shared services organizations accountable for providing needed support services, governance issues have grown in importance. The level of complexity and the scope of change involved in managing multi-sourced service delivery require organizations to find more effective ways to monitor workload, costs and service levels and to coordinate and align activities.

In the area of information systems services, an additional driver of the need for effective governance process has been the enactment of regulatory requirements and auditing standards around information management (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, SAS-70). Governance concerns related to these include:

  • Providing reasonable assurance that development of new or changes to existing applications or systems are authorized, tested, properly implemented and documented
  • Providing reasonable assurance that the organizational structure and systems environments
  • Providing adequate segregation of functions
  • Implementing project management methodology to administer and monitor application development activities
  • Enabling security and audit logging functionality on all platforms
  • Implementing a robust Change Control process for application/systems development and management
  • Assuring that information systems strategies, plans, and budgets are consistent with the organizations business and strategic goals

TBI’s works with clients to define their governance needs, and then to create or enhance governance mechanisms to meet these needs, utilizing our knowledge of governance best practices. Needed governance structures and processes may include: roles and responsibility matrices, enterprise steering committees, client and vendor relationship management programs, service level management processes, change management processes, escalation processes, problem management processes, and on-going program effectiveness review processes. The focus on governance is a routine part of the services TBI delivers in its Strategic Outsourcing and Performance Measurement practices, and is also closely aligned to TBI’s other Sourcing Solutions Management services.

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