What this service solves
Give one business unit a shared way to decide who can approve an automation change, review access, or respond when a workflow behaves unexpectedly. Governance design starts with the systems and ownership already in place and makes the decision points explicit enough for teams to use.
What you get
Ownership matrix
Identify the business owner, system owner, and escalation contact for recurring decisions and exceptions.
Control checklist
Define which changes need approval, what the approver should see, and how an access review or exception gets recorded.
Review cadence
Propose when the owners should review controls and what evidence they need to decide whether a control is working.
What’s included
Inventory authority and handoffs
Inventory how responsibility moves between the business, application owners, and review functions. Flag decisions with competing owners or unclear escalation.
Define change approvals, access reviews, and exception ownership
Draft approval and access-review controls for the risk and constraints the organization identifies. Describe the evidence a reviewer needs when a rule or access permission changes.
Plan a pilot governance review
Select a bounded workflow for a trial governance review and define the observations owners should bring to that session.
How implementation works
Map decision authority
Map decision authority using existing policies and interviews with the people responsible for the systems.
Draft controls
Draft controls and walk through routine changes, urgent exceptions, and overdue access reviews.
Validate with owners
Validate who owns each decision and whether the proposed checks can be supported by the team's tools and procedures.
Technical considerations
- Decision records
- Agree what evidence owners can produce from the tools already in use. For an exception, that may mean the affected workflow, the person making the decision, its reason, and a follow-up review date. An owner can then tell whether the approved exception is still appropriate.
Systems, inputs & prerequisites
An executive sponsor, existing access policies, and system owners.
- A sponsor, the current approval or access policies, and system owners who can describe actual procedures.
- Representative changes and incidents that show how staff record decisions today.
Starting scope & pricing
Base scope
Initial scoping covers one business unit. Controls and implementation depend on the organization.
Illustrative workflow
Propose a change
The workflow owner records the rule, the reason for changing it, and the teams affected.
Review the evidence
The designated approver checks the test result and access impact.
Confirm ownership
The review records the decision and sets the next control check.
Validation & handover
- Review a routine change and an urgent exception with the owners named in the matrix. Check that each path reaches someone who can decide.
- Use one workflow to check whether staff can produce the evidence called for by the access or change review.
- Identify decisions that require another team's authority or specialist input and record them as open before agreeing a rollout scope.
Limitations & possible extras
Limitations
Authority and required controls depend on the organization. Cross-unit rollout, implementation, and legal, privacy, or security specialist input require separate scoping.
Requirements and authority differ by organization. Final scope depends on the governance and risk context.
Possible extras
Legal, privacy, or security specialist input, additional teams, and rollout support.
Questions about this service
How do our current policies fit?
Treat approved policies as constraints. Map them to the decisions that occur in the workflow and identify where ownership or review evidence still needs clarification.
Do the proposed controls need new software?
Start with the records and review channels the business unit already uses. If a control requires a capability the current tools lack, flag it as an implementation dependency.
Which workflow makes a useful governance trial?
Choose one with a clear business owner, a recent change or exception, and enough evidence to review the decision. The trial should be small enough for those owners to agree on what they learned.
Can the engagement include company-wide rollout?
Initial scoping covers one business unit. Additional teams, implementation support, and specialist legal, privacy, or security input require separate agreement.