Clearly formulating the company’s mission and values, aligning all processes vis-à-vis all internal and external stakeholders with these values, formalising “who has the right to decide what”, these are the main roles of the governance of an organisation.
Governance in the high-tech company B2B / B2G
Some aspects of governance in the high-tech B2B / B2G company are directly relevant to the product markets competition aspects.
Product/market/competition governance concerns aspects such as
- General business ethics
- Risk management, compliance and liability, including product liability
- Processes and decision making
Without getting into the many debates about the moral responsibility of the companies to which it belongs, let us say that general business ethics formulate how a company believes it should behave towards different partners.
This can range from rules of behaviour towards customers and competitors to those towards society in general in the context of CSR/O (corporate social responsibility), for example to avoid the risk of harming people with certain technologies. Similar to those relating to bioethics, the current debates, for example, on the risks of AI (artificial intelligence) in general or applied in particular to robotics with autonomous decision-making are characteristic of these issues.
Moreover, the activities of hi-tech B2B/B2G companies are increasingly subject to regulatory and financing conditions, and raise particular issues of risk management, compliance and liability in the context of CSR, especially with regard to products.
For example, ensuring that technological products are ethical and non-hazardous during their manufacture, that they are as environmentally friendly as possible during and after use, and that they are more energy efficient, are among the concerns that will be taken into account and influence product design and development activities.
Processes and decision-making define both how a number of essential activities are to be conducted (the process standard applicable to all) and who has the right to decide what. For example, in the area of products/markets/competition, how the analysis of a market, the technical and economic feasibility of a product should be conducted and presented before authorising the commitment of development expenditure, a commercial product launch or the capture of a project. At the same time as the process to be followed with compulsory steps, the level of hierarchical responsibility associated with decisions will be defined. For example, who has the right to do so will be defined:
- Validate the commitment or cessation of development expenditure
- Decide whether or not to respond to a call for tenders
- To launch or stop a product on the market.
This aspect of clearly defining decision-making responsibilities is extremely important in order to avoid both a proliferation of unauthorised initiatives and decisions being taken “by default” without anyone taking responsibility for them.
Some of the classics in technology, both damaging and costly, are:
- Anarchic technical developments without overall coherence
- commercial launches that are too early or too late
- Decisions that turn out to have been wrong without it being possible to identify the cause
- Or product catalogues that contain too many products that are useless for the business simply because no one is in charge of deciding whether to stop selling them.
