Are we quorate?

The question that starts every meeting

"Are we quorate?"

Someone counts heads. Someone else digs through the Terms of Reference to work out who actually gets a vote. I've lost count of how many meetings started exactly like that.

I've been secretary to a lot of governance committees over the years. The last was a technology risk group, which I volunteered for because I wanted to understand how a modern technology department actually works.

Every one of them generated a mountain of admin, and not one had any dedicated tooling to handle it. Governance ran on Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.

Before each meeting I'd open the last agenda, cross-reference the last minutes, and work out which actions had moved. Then chase every owner by email. Then chase again on Teams when the email went nowhere. At the meeting I'd tick off attendance, then face the quorum question, and the head-counting dance would start all over again. Worse still when quorum is a percentage rather than a hard number.

None of this was hard. It was just relentless, and entirely manual.

It wasn't just that committee

Here's the part that really gets me. It wasn't just that committee, and it wasn't just that company.

Every organisation I've worked in has run dozens of committees and working groups. Risk, audit, change, security, data, the list goes on. Almost every one of them runs exactly the same way: a person, a stack of Word documents, and a lot of chasing.

Think about that for a second.

Some of the most important decisions an organisation makes are tracked in email threads and Word documents held together by one diligent person's memory.

Who owns which risk, what gets approved, who is accountable. Nobody designed it that way. It built up over the years, one workaround at a time, until it became so normal that nobody stopped to question it.

So I went shopping

I went looking for the software that fixes this. Proper tooling, built for governance, that a normal team could actually afford and run.

It does exist. There are capable, polished products out there, and the better ones now stretch beyond the board to the committees beneath it.

But two things kept getting in the way.

The first was cost. Pricing built around the boardroom turns eye-watering the moment you try to extend it across the dozens of committees and working groups doing the day-to-day work.

The second was where your data had to live. Almost every product wanted to lift your governance information out of your organisation and onto the provider's own systems. For some of the most sensitive material a company holds, that gave me real pause.

So it wasn't that nothing existed. It was that nothing quite fit: affordable enough for every committee, and content to stay inside your own walls.

How hard could it be?

And that's roughly the moment a dangerous thought arrived: how hard could it be?

The honest answer is a story in itself, and it's the story this blog is here to tell. The short version is that the dangerous thought became Governance Hub: a committee governance system that installs into your own Microsoft tenant, so your governance data never leaves your organisation.

If any of this sounds like the committees where you work, drop me a message, I'd genuinely like to hear how other organisations handle it. And if you'd like to see what we built, we're always happy to show it. No obligation, just a conversation.