Governance is not a new concept. While it might be fashionable to talk about it now with recent highly publicized corporate failures, the need for management oversight has been around for as long as we moved to a professional management class – i.e. we let someone else manage our businesses. Therefore, taking a historical perspective can be instructive and so here is one thread that contributes some context to our recent thinking on “management controls”.

The historical thread that this article explores is the little appreciated fact that many of today’s management techniques and best practices can be directly traced to the engineering and management disciplines applied by the United States (US) military programs in the post-war (WW2) period. How that came to be is a story in itself and for those who are curious the historical evolution of the multi-disciplinary approach to management that was originally known as Systems Management, can be found in Johnson’s excellent book [1].

Johnson describes how the need to address technical complexity and change during the arms-race led to the emergence of the closely related fields of project management (PM), systems engineering (SE) and Operations Research that were widely practiced during the Cold War period that culminated in the “race to the moon”.

Faced with the extraordinary demands to create and deploy novel, complex systems at a rapid pace, these three groups produced new techniques to manage the diversity and scale of information and technology. (Johnson 1997, p892)

The term Systems Management is not widely used today (I for one lament that loss) and instead we have seen the specialization of management and engineering disciplines with the focus being on PM and SE. While we find PM applied in most organizations, the more “engineering” focus of SE is often neglected even thought it aimed to provide an interdisciplinary, whole-system lifecycle viewpoint and to control interface problems in complex systems. The exception that comes to mind is Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking – but that is another story.

To return to the theme of governance, the key takeaway here is that the early creators of the Systems Management approach recognised that “complexity was also a management problem” and developed a critical control mechanism called Configuration Management (CM, that today would be better understood by most people as Change Management or Change Control) .

It may be a surprise to those who apply CM principally as a technical support function, that when first introduced, CM practices were viewed as a management innovation of major significance. CM played a key role in the military’s product development lifecycle, providing support for both PM and SE practices, enabling managers to oversee and control project scope, product specifications and interfaces, as well as the cost and schedule impacts of any change.

CM’s importance can hardly be overstated. Managers from the turn of the century through the 1950s had searched for ways to predict R&D costs and to control scientists and engineers. Configuration management achieved this control on development projects, as it allowed accountants and lawyers to tie technical modifications to contract modifications, including costs. Configuration management enabled government to control industry.

As can be seen from the above quote from Johnson’s historical account, CM was an early, multidisciplinary governance mechanism that brought together both commercial and technical management. In its time, CM helped to bring the US government’s freewheeling engineering and scientific agencies under greater scrutiny and management control after some costly, high-profile failures (see, history really does repeat itself). The organizational structures, like change control boards and design authorities, ensured appropriate reviews and approvals were in place for the program of work to proceed - and closely parallel the governance structures that need to be put in place to satisfy today governance requirements.

However, despite the early excitement around CM, it failed to find a prominent role in the management disciplines widely applied in today’s business environment. Notwithstanding the increasing scale and complexity of business and IT solutions, CM failed to gain wide acceptance until fairly recently. This is now changing with the growing prominence of services management approach taken by ITIL [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL] and the IT governance framework, COBIT [http://www.isaca.org/CobiT] – both of which see “change management” as a linchpin relating the different aspects of governance.

In its implementation, CM, like any governance process, can become a highly administrative, bureaucratic process that can at times be thankless and apparently unproductive. This serves to make these processes amenable to automation by increasingly sophisticated workflow tools that can coordinate and support the review and approval processes. Hence implementing governance processes in the enterprise can benefit from the lessons learned in the early formulation and implementation of CM – both present significant organizational (change management) challenges and succeed only when we do not lose sight of the forest for the trees.