Laurence Hart: Governance Propels the Digital Workplace Forward. Laurence's post is in response to Martyn Perks' post, Goodbye Governance, We Don't Need You Anymore.

It should come as no surprise that I'm much closer to Laurence's position than Martyn's, but it's not reflexive. Rather, I found Martyn's post to be logically inconsistent. I'd posit that what he wants is not a lack of governance, but governance provided in a way that, as Laurence notes, moves the organization forward. In other words, he wants smart governance that aligns to business goals and objectives rather than "a set of deadweight policies that inhibit how staff work." But smart governance doesn't mean no governance; rather, it means balancing what the organization needs to do to meet its needs, including legal and regulatory requirements, with a governance framework that works for employees.

To riff off of Laurence's example, cooking requires a governance framework and lots of governance elements in it:

• Appropriate temperatures for storing and cooking food, which differ based on the type of food and the ingredients used
• Appropriate balancing between time and temperature - for example, you can't bake bread at 250 degrees, and you can't cook an edible brisket at 500 degrees
• Proportional use of ingredients - baking is chemistry as much as it is art, and even a simple salad dressing works best at certain proportions of acid to oil. 

And we could probably add many more. And there is some flexibility in most cooking - who's to say you can't put bacon in an apple pie? But if you stray too far from the practices espoused in the cooking (governance) framework, you end up having to deal with unexpected outcomes or even unintended consequences. So too with information governance in the enterprise.