Accelerated Innovation

Governing and Auditing EDD Practices

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Governing and Auditing EDD Practices

Description

This capability focuses on establishing governance and auditability for Evaluation-Driven Development (EDD) activities. It includes defining policies, assigning responsibilities, standardizing evaluation protocols, logging decisions, and ensuring that GenAI solutions are consistently evaluated before deployment and over time.

Why it's Important

Without strong governance, EDD practices may become fragmented, inconsistent, or misaligned with enterprise risk expectations. Auditing ensures teams can demonstrate that GenAI evaluations were conducted properly and that decisions were backed by meaningful evidence. By governing and auditing EDD activities, organizations reduce the risk of quality lapses, support regulatory compliance, and build confidence in how GenAI systems are tested and maintained.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • Evaluation protocols vary across teams: Inconsistent formats and methods make it hard to compare or verify EDD quality.
  • No centralized tracking of evaluation decisions: It’s difficult to determine what was tested, when, by whom, and with what results.
  • Responsibility for EDD oversight is unclear: Governance can fall through the cracks between product, risk, and engineering teams.
  • Auditing is treated as an afterthought: Evidence may be incomplete, undocumented, or scattered across systems.
  • Regulatory requirements are evolving: It’s not always clear what needs to be captured or reviewed for compliance.

Complexity

High: Maturing this capability requires clear ownership models, standardized evaluation and logging practices, audit tooling, and ongoing collaboration between GenAI, governance, and risk teams.

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Taking Action

Though most organizations begin their GenAI journey with significant knowledge gaps, there are targeted actions that can be taken to accelerate the process. Select your group’s current maturity, based on your assessment results, and act today.

The most important part of any journey is starting… To move from “Exploring” to “Experimenting”, focus on the following key actions:
  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the Evaluation Driven Development for High-Impact GenAI Solutions workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices
  • Framing the Role of Evaluation in GenAI Development
  • Understanding Key EDD Concepts and Benefits
  • Linking EDD to Risk Mitigation and Solution Quality
  • Identifying Where and When to Use EDD
  • Planning Your EDD Implementation Strategy
  • Define Your Action Plan: Outline concrete, prioritized steps your organization will take to implement GenAI Strategy.
  • Align on your Current State and define your Target State
  • Create an actionable enablement plan
  • Define target timeline and measures of success
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.
  • Define an Initial EDD Documentation Template: Capture evaluation scope, test inputs, and outcomes in a standard format.
  • Log Evaluation Results in a Shared Repository: Store artifacts in a location that supports access, traceability, and reuse.
  • Assign an EDD Owner for a Single Solution: Designate one person to be accountable for ensuring evaluation activities are completed and logged.
To move from Experimentation to “Lifting-Off”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including:
  • Selecting Your EDD Methodology
  • Defining Your EDD Action Plan & DoR Measures
  • Curating Your EDD Data
  • Configuring Your EDD Solution
  • Executing & Analyzing Your EDD Results
  • Optimizing Iterating Your Results
  • Leveraging EDD to Monitor & Govern Your GenAI Solution
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Review whether EDD documentation is complete, auditable, and standardized.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Establish policies for how evaluations must be logged, reviewed, and retained.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Ensure your governance tools can track who performed evaluations, what was tested, and what decisions were made.
  • Define Your Adoption & Scaling Plan: Create a structured roadmap for how GenAI solutions will be rolled out across teams, workflows, or business units
  • Define Your Phased Implementation Plan: Introduce EDD governance roles, tools, and templates across multiple projects.
  • Build Awareness and Finalize Enablers: Align risk, compliance, and product teams on shared goals and expectations.
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Publish guidance on how to conduct and document evaluations for audit readiness.
To move from Lifting-Off to “Accelerating”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases
  • Publish an EDD Governance Framework: Define required artifacts, ownership roles, and approval steps across the development lifecycle.
  • Standardize Evaluation Logging Tools and Processes: Ensure consistency in how evaluation metadata and results are captured.
  • Create an Audit Checklist for Every Solution: Enable teams to self-assess whether EDD practices meet governance standards.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers
  • Embed EDD Governance into Project Templates: Make evaluation logging and compliance review part of default solution workflows.
  • Support Teams in Closing Governance Gaps: Offer training, playbooks, or tooling to help teams meet EDD documentation requirements.
  • Track EDD Compliance Rates Across the Portfolio: Identify where governance is strong and where improvements are needed.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum
  • Highlight Projects That Meet EDD Audit Standards: Showcase examples of well-governed GenAI development.
  • Recognize Cross-Functional Governance Teams: Celebrate coordination between product, engineering, and compliance.
  • Share Insights from Audit Reviews: Publish what was learned from audits and how it led to better processes or outcomes.
The “Accelerating” stage represents “Target State” for many capabilities. “Breaking Away”, on the other hand, suggests that the specific Capability represents a clear competitive advantage for your business.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine
  • Integrate EDD Governance into Standard Risk Reviews: Align GenAI evaluation checkpoints with enterprise risk frameworks.
  • Make Evaluation Artifacts Available Across Systems: Ensure test logs and decision records are accessible in product, QA, and compliance tools.
  • Build Governance into CI/CD Pipelines: Automate compliance checks and artifact validation before release.
  • Leverage Automation: Using GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort
  • Auto-Log Evaluation Decisions and Test Results: Reduce manual tracking by capturing evaluation data during pipeline runs.
  • Generate Governance Summaries Automatically: Provide dashboards or reports showing EDD coverage, completeness, and review status.
  • Alert on Missing or Incomplete Audit Fields: Notify teams when key documentation or approvals are missing.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases
  • Tailor Governance Models by Use Case Type: Define appropriate controls based on business impact or regulatory exposure.
  • Benchmark Governance Maturity Across Teams: Assess and compare how well groups are managing EDD quality and traceability.
  • Use Audit Outcomes to Inform Policy Updates: Adapt governance frameworks based on what’s working in practice.

Key "Watchouts"

As you take action you’ll want to avoid:

  • Treating governance as overhead: Governance should enable better decisions, not block progress.
  • Leaving responsibility unclear: Without defined owners, EDD governance and auditing won’t get done.
  • Inconsistent evaluation standards: Misaligned formats and scoring methods weaken audit value.
  • Documentation without intent: Logging artifacts that no one uses or reviews adds little value.
  • Delaying audit planning until the end: Build auditability into evaluation from day one.

Targeted Benefits

While Governing and Auditing EDD Practices can be challenging, its benefits are clear and compelling, including:

  • Greater confidence in GenAI solutions: Teams and stakeholders know evaluations were done right.
  • Faster, safer approvals: Decisions backed by strong EDD records reduce launch friction.
  • Improved accountability and traceability: It’s easy to see what was tested, when, and why.
  • Stronger cross-functional alignment: Shared frameworks bring together engineering, product, and risk.
  • Audit-ready operations: Governance practices support compliance with internal and external standards.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

Hi, I'm Eddie 👋

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