CIO · IT Director

What are you relying on when you tell the board the database side is under control?

The answer is probably correct. The question is not whether it is true, but what it rests on.

How this question is answered today

You ask your team. You get the answer "it is under control". That answer is honest and most likely correct.

But that answer is the knowledge of a person, not the output of a system. Ask the same question six months from now, when that person has moved on, and you will not get the same confidence.

The commitment you gave the board rests somewhere you cannot see.

What that answer costs

Two weeks lost before every audit. That time is charged to no project and appears in no report.
Confidence lost when a key person leaves. The new person cannot give the same answer, because the answer was never in the system.
After an incident, being unable to show the control was working that day. It may well have been. There is no proof.
The same risk assessed differently by different people. Both defensible, neither recorded.

What governance changes

Governance does not add a process. It takes the good processes you already have out of personal dependency.

The rule a change was approved under sits inside the record, together with the rule as it stood that day. Even after the rules change, an old record is still read against the rules of its own day.

The answer you give the board then rests on a verifiable record rather than on someone's memory.

You know exactly what you are relying on when you tell the board the database side is under control.