Tag: #maturity

Organizational and security governance is touted as a key component of any successful security program. However, I’ve been thinking about governance lately and how it relates to the overall maturity of an organization. This has prompted some questions such as: what happens if you have too much governance? and What’s the relationship between security governance and organizational maturity?

What Is Governance?

First, let’s talk about what governance is.

Governance is the process by which an organization defines, implements and controls the business.

Let’s unpack what this means for a security organization. The process of defining security for the business is done through policies, standards and guidelines. Security policies are requirements the business must meet based on laws, regulations or best practices adopted by the business. These policies align to business objectives. Implementation is done through security controls that are put in place to meet a specific policy or to manage a risk. Lastly, controlling the business is done via audits and compliance checks. The security org follows up on how well the business is following policies, implementing controls and managing risk. Control can also include enforcement, which can involve gating processes, such as requiring approval for business critical and high risk activities, or recommending additional security requirements for the business to manage a risk.

Why Do We Need Governance At All?

In an ideal world we wouldn’t. Imagine a business that is created entirely of clones of yourself. There would be implicit and explicit trust between you and your other selves to do what is best for the business. Communication would be simple and you would already be aligned. In this case you don’t need a lot (or any) governance because you can trust yourself to do the things. However, unless you are Michael Keaton in Multiplicity, this just isn’t a reality.

Governance achieves a few things for a business. First, it communicates what is required of its employees and aligns those employees to common objectives. Second, it helps employees prioritize activities. None of this would be needed if human’s weren’t so complex with diverse backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, education, etc. In an ideal world we wouldn’t need any governance at all. The reality is, we do need governance, but it needs to be balanced so it doesn’t unnecessarily impede the business.

How Does This Relate To Organizational Maturity?

Organizational maturity refers to how your employees are able to execute their tasks to achieve the objectives of the business. This relates to things like the quality of code, how quickly teams resolve operational issues or how efficiently they perform a series of tasks. It can be loosely thought of as efficiency, but I actually think it combines efficiency with professionalism and integrity. Maturity is knowing what good is and being able to execute efficiently to get there. There is a fantastic book about this topic called Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren PhD.

Which brings us to the relationship of governance and maturity…

There is an inverse relationship between organizational maturity and organizational governance. In simple terms:

The less mature an organization, the more governance is needed.

For example, if your organization struggles to apply patches in a timely manner, continually introduces new code vulnerabilities into production or repeatedly demonstrates behavior that places the business at risk, then your organizational maturity is low. When organizational maturity is low, the business needs to put processes and controls in place to align employees and direct behavior to achieve the desired outcomes. In the examples above, increased governance is an attempt to manage risk because your employees are behaving in a way that lacks maturity and is placing the business at risk.

What causes low organizational maturity?

Organizational maturity is a reflection of employee behavior, skillset, knowledge, education and alignment. In other words, organizational maturity is a reflection of your organizational culture. In practical terms your employees may simply not know how to do something. They may not have experience with working for your type of business or in the industry you operate in. Perhaps they had a really bad boss at a past job and learned bad behavior. Whatever the reason, low organizational maturity is linked to lots of sub-optimal outcomes in business.

How To Improve Organizational Maturity?

If governance and maturity are inversely linked, the question becomes how can we increase organizational maturity so we need less governance? There are a lot of ways to increase organizational maturity. One that is fairly obvious is to start with a mature organization and maintain it over time. However, this is easier said than done and is why some organizations are fanatical about culture. This relates to everything from hiring to talent management and requires strong leadership at all levels of the company.

“The less mature an organization,
the more governance is needed.”

Other ways to improve organizational maturity are through training and education. This is why security awareness and training programs are so critical to a successful security program. Security awareness and training programs are literally attempting to improve organizational maturity through education.

One last way to improve maturity is via process. The security organization can establish a new process that all teams must follow. As teams go through this process you can educate them and reward teams that exhibit the ideal behavior by relaxing the process for them. You can also help teams educate themselves by publishing the requirements and making the process transparent. The challenge with imposing a new process is having the discipline to modify or remove the process when needed, which comes back to governance.

What’s the right level of governance?

The optimal level of governance is going to be based on your organizational maturity and desired business outcomes. In order to determine if you have too much or too little governance you need to measure organizational maturity and the effectiveness of existing organizational governance. There are industry standard processes for measuring organizational maturity, like the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Six Sigma, or you can create your own metrics. Some ways to measure governance effectiveness are:

• Ask For Feedback On Security Processes – Are the processes effective? Do teams view them as an impediment or are they viewed favorably? Are the processes easy to navigate and objective or are they opaque and subjective?
• Measure Effectiveness Of Security Controls – Are your security controls effective? If you ask a team to do work to implement a security control you should have clear metrics that determine if that control is effective. If you implement a control, but that control hasn’t changed the outcome, then the control is ineffective. This can indicate your governance is ineffective or your organizational maturity needs to improve.
• Assess and Update Policy – Security policies should be living documents. They shouldn’t be set in stone. Security policies need to map back to laws and regulations they support and the business requirements needed to be successful. Laws, regulations and business requirements all change over time and so should your security policies. By having up to date and relevant security policies you can ensure your organizational governance matches the maturity of the business.

What Are Typical Scenarios For Governance And Maturity?

There are four scenarios related to governance and maturity:

A mature organization with too much governance – your organization is mature, but you are overly controlling with process and requirements. The net effect will be to slow down and impede the business unnecessarily. You are effectively lowering the organizational maturity due to too much governance.

An immature organization with too little governance – this is a recipe for disaster. If your organization is immature and you fail to govern the organization you will open the business up to unnecessary risk. You will get out maneuvered by your competitors, you will miss opportunities, you will fail to comply with laws and regulations and generally will have a lot of activity without any result. Your employees will lack coordination and as a result your business will suffer.

A mature organization with too little governance – This isn’t a bad scenario to be in. A mature organization implies they are doing the right things and don’t need a lot of guidance. A laissez faire attitude may be the right thing to allow employees flexibility and freedom, but it does come with inherent risk of not being compliant with laws and regulations. It may also mean there is duplication of effort or multiple ways of doing things, which could be optimized.

Governance and maturity are balanced – obviously this is the ideal scenario where your organizational governance is balanced to the level of maturity of the organization. Easy to think about in practice, difficult to achieve in reality.

Wrapping Up

Organizational governance and maturity are inversely related and need to be balanced in order for the business to operate effectively. There are ways to measure organizational maturity and governance effectiveness and by having a continual feedback loop you can optimally align both for success.