Summary of the Focus Group Results
GovernanceExcellence Focus Groups
Six Focus Groups were convened across Canada earlier to gain help in making sure that GovernanceExcellence was best focused on your needs. Nearly 100 Governance Professionals from large, small, private and public organizations participated through a combination of on-line survey and facilitated workshop sessions. Their enthousiasm for the Governance Excellence concept both encouraged us and helped to develop the initial modules now ready for Beta Test.
The survey and Focus Groups assessed areas and issues in governance for both their Criticality and the current Capacity in their organization to deal with these areas and issues.
The “Top Ten” Critical Issues were:
* Internal Control
* Disclosure
* Role of the External Auditor
* Audit Committee
* Board Independence
* Compensation
* MD&A
* Succession
* SOX
* Board/Director Assessment
While the majority of the respondents said that they were on average largely "compliant" with requirements in these areas, only in the areas of Disclosure and Aduit Committee did the average of the results reach the "best practices" level. About 20% of the responses across all issues were “Awareness and readiness is low – there has been little action of planning”.
Key findings:
In general, at least half of the respondents conduct their overall governance activities in a less than formal, somewhat ad hoc and probably under-resourced manner – with a focus on “doing what they know they have to do”.
There is little in the way of IT enabled system support to help the governance “professionals” inside the firms.
These were among the observations that led to the idea of the GovernanceExcellence initiative.