Design controls as software products.
Manual controls are tickets, documents, and trust. An engineered control is code: versioned, tested, owned, and observable.
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GOVERNANCE ENGINEERING
What is Governance Engineering?
The application of software engineering principles and tools to automate SDLC governance.
AI is disrupting traditional governance
Governance that can scale to agentic change rates.
Legacy SDLC governance doesn't scale with AI
Engineer governance as code in your pipelines, not tacked on as a retrospective pen and paper process
Eliminate manual approval bottlenecks
Ensure the safety and auditability of every control through cryptographic proof instead of human checks
Audit every change in real time
Go from retrospective and sampled control testing to continuous reconciliation - no gaps, no findings.
The problem
Tackle the last manual step in software delivery.
You automated build, test, and deploy years ago, but governance still runs on forms, meetings, and screenshots. Everyone pays - engineers in toil and delays, security in poor risk control, audit in cost and findings.
Automated
Code
minutes
Test
minutes
Deploy
minutes
Still manual
Governance
days to weeks
Evidence
Legacy Governance
Screenshots, tickets, and exports, assembled by hand.
Governance Engineering
Captured automatically at the point of action.
Controls
Legacy Governance
Policy documents, enforced by meetings. Over 90% of changes rubber stamped.
Governance Engineering
Automatic policy enforcement and evidence.
Audit
Legacy Governance
Expensive, retrospective, time consuming and sampled.
Governance Engineering
Continuous assurance over every event
The FCA analyzed over 1M production changes and found manual governance correlates with worse outcomes. DORA research shows formal CAB approval makes low performance 2.6x more likely. And regulation (EU DORA, NIS2) already expects continuous, defensible evidence. It is time to act.
The outcome
Continuous Compliance delivered in practice.
By engineering your controls compliance stops being a periodic project and becomes an automated output of your SDLC.
Always audit-ready.
Compliance is provable at any moment, as of any date. Every audit is a green tick instead of a scramble.
Zero marginal cost.
The 10,000th change is governed as cheaply as the first. Governance throughput scales with delivery.
Better risk control.
Every change evaluated against every policy, every time. Humans look only at what genuinely needs judgment.
The practice
Engineer the controls, don't automate the paperwork.
Governance Engineering is what happens when technologists design risk controls.
Automate Enforcement.
Compliance happens in objective and provable decisions, not in a meeting weeks later. The compliant path is the fast path.
Never automate the tickets.
Faster paperwork is worse because risks aren't mitigated, they're accelerated. Engineer the control, not the receipt.
What Governance Engineering is not
A GRC tool
Off the shelf GRC tools can provide a fast path to SOC2 compliance, but Governance Engineering is the practice where engineers design and operate complex enterprise controls.
Ticket automation
Automating broken processes with generated database rows is a risk accelerator and control anti-pattern that Governance Engineering corrects.
A technology solution
Like DevOps and SRE, Governance Engineering is about overcoming established silos and ways of working than any particular tool or technology.
Governance Infrastructure
Your Governance Infrastructure Architecture.
The practice needs an infrastructure platform comprising four layers. The layers in the stack connect data through relationships and entities.
01
Evidence
Record trusted facts from across the SDLC, in a form that can be queried and connected.
02
Control
Express and apply policy as controls, mapped to the evidence that satisfies them, operated automatically.
03
Audit
Demonstrate assurance to auditors, regulators, customers, and the board, continuously and as of any point in time.
04
Insight
Provide insight into how the SDLC and its controls are actually performing.
This is what Kosli provides.
Explore Governance Infrastructure
The Control Group
Want to learn more? Join the club.
Governance Engineering is being defined in the open: in the FINOS SDLC Common Controls Working Group, in the Controls Engineering book, and in The Control Group, our community for engineering leaders in regulated industries.
Come compare notes with the practitioners doing this work at the world's largest banks.
Join The Control Group
Controls engineering
Download the Guide to Controls Engineering
Learn how to turn governance into code.
Controls Engineering applies modern software engineering practices, requirements, testing, automation, observability, to the controls that govern software delivery. A control becomes a software product, not a paperwork exercise.
DevOps applied software engineering to operations. SRE applied it to reliability. Controls Engineering applies it to governance.
Get started
Start engineering
Start engineering
your governance.
Read the guide the practitioners wrote, or talk to the team shaping the practice.
Watch it work, end to end
See the platform enterprise teams use to automate governance across build, release, and runtime.
Kosli in action