By Ron Gidron
The Traditional Governance Burden
I remember meeting with a large banking client whose governance process was encapsulated in 82 slides that showed their process. It was a perfect example of what I call the traditional governance burden, which consists of paperwork, describing the paperwork, and then some more paperwork.
This traditional model of governance is characterized by extensive documentation requirements, manual review boards, sequential approval chains, and paper trails prioritized over actual outcomes – and all of this creates significant time delays between development and implementation.
The irony is that traditional governance often focuses more on documenting the process than on the effectiveness of the process itself. My colleague looked at those 82 slides and remarked, “out of those 80 slides, it’s probably only about three that we need.” He was right.
The Shift to Automated Governance
The modern evolution of governance centers on building automated guardrails rather than manual checkpoints. This represents a fundamental philosophical shift. We’re moving from human gatekeepers to automated policy enforcement, transitioning from point-in-time approvals to continuous validation, and replacing documentation-heavy processes with code-defined policies.
Automated governance doesn’t sacrifice security or stability—it enhances them. Governance is where you take these CI/CD-like automations, but you hook them up to triggers to avoid inconsistency and increase compliance.
This approach offers several advantages. We achieve consistency because rules are applied uniformly without human bias or oversight. We gain immediacy as validation happens in real-time rather than through delayed reviews. The process becomes preventative rather than detective, with issues caught before they progress rather than discovered afterward. Finally, we achieve scale because automated governance can handle volume that would overwhelm manual processes.
Let me give you a specific example: If a change has flown from one instance into a QA instance, I know that the QA instance and this dev instance are inconsistent with my third. So I can have a governance rule that says anything that makes it to QA and is successfully committed needs to flow down to go back to a different development environment – I refer to this as “smart sync”.
This demonstrates how automated governance maintains system integrity across complex multi-environment setups without manual intervention. The key insight is that governance becomes embedded in the tools and systems rather than existing as a separate, manual layer of oversight.
Effective Tools Replacing Manual Reviews
Traditional reviews suffer from several challenges. As organizations grow, manual review becomes a significant bottleneck, creating scalability issues. Different reviewers may apply different standards, leading to consistency problems. The emphasis shifts from actual quality to documentation of the review, and manual reviews introduce waiting periods that slow delivery.
With proper tools, DevOps can be transformed to allow governance to expand its scope while reducing its burden by automating routine compliance checks, creating auditable trails without manual documentation, applying consistent standards across all changes, and scaling to handle increased change volume.
In this evolved model, human oversight doesn’t disappear—it shifts focus. People move from reviewing all changes to defining governance policies. They transition from manual verification to exception handling, and from process enforcement to process improvement.
This approach helps enlist people who are liable for governance processes by giving them tools that satisfy their compliance requirements without imposing excessive burdens on development teams.
The Future of Governance in a DevOps Context
Looking ahead, I see AI playing a significant role in further governance evolution: we’re going to see a lot of decision-making automation in the process.
This suggests governance will become increasingly intelligent with predictive testing, adaptive policies, automated decision-making for routine governance questions, and pattern recognition that identifies anomalies requiring attention.
The ultimate goal in this evolution is striking a new balance. We need to enable rapid delivery without compromising quality or security—speed without sacrifice. We must meet regulatory requirements without unnecessary process overhead—compliance without constraint. We should provide transparency without creating documentation burdens—visibility without overhead. And we need to maintain system integrity without creating development delays—control without bottlenecks.
Perhaps most significantly, this evolution reframes governance not as a restrictive force but as an enabler: Let developers do the stuff that they love, let them write the code, see it work, think, design it, implement it, push it, see that it works.
By automating governance concerns, organizations free their teams to focus on value creation rather than compliance activities—transforming governance from a burden into a competitive advantage.
This evolution represents a fundamental shift in perspective: governance becomes not about what teams can’t do, but about creating the conditions where they can safely do more.
Gidron is the CEO of xtype. He has spent nearly three decades working with companies such as Mercury Interactive, Symantec, and Automic Software (acquired by CA.) The technical scaling challenges he experienced on his journey inspired him to start xtype in April 2020.