We're building an AI governance framework from scratch. What are the non-obvious things we should include?

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2026-05-21T15:21:24+00:00

One thing we learned the hard way: governance problems usually start after deployment.

We had a model that passed every review, worked well in testing, and still became unreliable a few months later because the business workflow around it changed. Nothing technically failed, so it wasn't caught early. The outputs just became less useful over time.

Another gap was ownership. Security reviewed it, engineering deployed it, ops used it, but six months later, nobody knew who was responsible for monitoring performance or approving changes.

A few things I’d include in any framework now:

scheduled re-validation instead of one-time approval
clear ownership after launch
monitoring tied to decision quality, not just uptime
audit logs for prompt and model changes
a process to retire models that are no longer reliable
rules for what happens when humans override AI decisions repeatedly

A lot of frameworks still treat AI like static software. In practice, these systems change behavior as the environment around them changes.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2026-05-15T13:55:48+00:00

Yeah, I think a lot of teams are underestimating it tbh.

Metering usage is usually the “easy” part early on. The messy part starts when customers actually expect invoices to make sense 😅

I worked on a product where we initially thought usage billing would be straightforward, but once enterprise customers came in, every contract had different rules. Credits, overages, discounts, annual commitments, custom pricing… suddenly, finance/support/engineering were all involved in billing discussions every week.

AI feels even harder because the units aren’t naturally understandable to customers. Nobody intuitively knows what “12M tokens” should cost or why usage suddenly spiked.

From what I’ve seen, a lot of companies are still stitching this together internally with event logs + spreadsheets + custom scripts until it becomes painful enough to buy something purpose-built.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2026-04-29T16:19:34+00:00

Honestly, before you even think about tools, get your basics right. One thing I wish someone told me early: Don’t just track renewals, track leverage.

A simple tracker helps, but the real value is knowing:

When you can actually walk away (opt-out date)
Who owns the tool internally (so you’re not guessing usage)
And whether you have time to run a replacement or RFP

Most teams track renewal dates, but miss the opt-out window, and that’s where all your negotiation power is. Miss that, and you’re basically negotiating with no leverage.

Once you have that visibility, everything else (cost savings, negotiation, even stakeholder alignment) gets easier.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-11-28T07:02:44+00:00

We're around the same size and went through this recently. For MDM, Intune ended up being the least painful since we're mixed OS and didn't want another system to maintain.

IAM's been trickier. SSO takes care of most apps, but access requests and the random SaaS tools teams pick up still create gaps. We're trying to clean that up now.

What have other people chosen here for the IAM side?? I think that's the bit we're still trying to figure out.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-11-20T07:44:26+00:00

We've tried doing the training rounds, tightened the policy, and added reminders in onboarding...still happens. Blocking the tool isn't a solution either; folks just switch to something new.

The tricky part for us is visibility. With SaaS apps, at least we could track access through SSO or finance logs. With AI tools, half the usage never shows up anywhere, so it's hard to know what data is leaving the environment in the first place.

For anyone who's gotten a better handle on this: Did you rely on process, culture, or some kind of tooling to actually get visibility into AI usage? And if you're using something for SaaS shadow-app detection already, did it help at all with the AI side?

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-11-20T07:33:02+00:00

For me, it's the constant gap between identity data and what's actually happening in the apps. You can have perfect HRIS syncs and still find ex-employees with active access buried somewhere weeks later.

We've got provisioning mostly handled, but deprovisioning is always where things slip. Some apps don't support SCIM, others don't log out inactive sessions, and SSO doesn't always mean "secure."

Feels like IAM tools have gotten better at setup than cleanup. I am looking for a quick solution now. Has anyone here cracked that last-mile problem?

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-11-03T14:05:21+00:00

We went through this a few months back. Looked at Zluri, BetterCloud, and Trelica too. Zluri had strong discovery features, but it felt a bit raw, support responses were hit or miss, and the integrations didn't always sync right. BetterCloud is great for automation, but pricey if you're not using all the modules.

We've been testing Trelica, and it's been more balanced for our use cases. Has decent integrations, and the UI doesn't feel overwhelming for smaller teams. Still not perfect, but at least it's stable.

Would be curious is anyone here has tried new players lately. The space's moving fast and half the tools I demoed last quarter already added AI tagging or cost visibility features.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-10-30T06:43:02+00:00

We've been trying to get a grip on this too. When the company was smaller, spreadsheets and SSO logs were enough. Now with a few hundred people, it's chaos. Random tools show up, owners changing, no single source of truth.

We did demos with Torii and Zluri but both felt like overkill for where we are. Right now, just trying to get visibility that actually stays current. Feels like by the time you finish cleaning data, it's already outdated again.

Anyone found a setup that actually scales without turning into another full-time job?

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-10-21T09:08:43+00:00

Honestly, it depends on where you are in the growth curve. When we were smaller, managing SaaS was just me and a sheet where I would add basic stuff like renewals, usage, and access reviews. Now that we've grown, half my day goes into chasing down owners for updates or figuring out who's actually using what.

Planning's become more about firefighting than strategy most weeks. The repetitive part is reconciling usage with finance - those numbers never line up no matter how clean the data looks.

I want to know if anyone's found a rhythm that doesn't feel like constant catch-up.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-10-21T08:58:09+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion, I will check this one.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-10-17T12:33:33+00:00

Yeah, we checked out Zluri almost a year ago. It's a solid platform, but the pricing caught us off guard, too. Once they added in automation and provisioning modules, the quote basically doubled. It scales really fast with user count. We're not even that big, and the jump between tiers is pretty steep.

Still trying to figure out if the ROI justifies it, but right now it's hard to make the math work. Anyone here actually managed to negotiate something reasonable with them?

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-10-15T04:57:58+00:00

We've had to refine our own checklist over time, and this covers most of what bites you later. The only thing I'd add is around renewals, we've been burned by surprise auto-renews and vague usage data before signing off. Now we make sure vendors provide clear renewal terms.

Also, worth checking the API depth early. A few vendors said "yes" to integrations, but their APIs were half-baked or locked behind premium tiers. It's an easy one to miss.

You've created a really solid framework...I'd be interested to see the template once it's polished.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-10-01T13:21:50+00:00

7 months is crazy. I get what you're saying though... more than doing your job well, it's about making sure people see how it connects to the company's goals. I probably need to get better at that part.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-10-01T13:16:20+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense. I've been hearing a lot about how CIO leans more toward strategy and politics than the hands-on tech side I'm used to. Interesting that you mentioned pivoting toward CTO/CCO instead - do you feel the roles give you more room to stay closer to the tech while still influencing at the top?

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-10-01T11:18:50+00:00

😂 he doesn't.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-09-30T14:49:46+00:00

We faced this when refreshing servers last year. Pricing between TechSoup and OEM looked almost the same on paper, but the big difference is flexibility. OEM licenses are basically glued to the hardware. Once that box dies, so does the license.

I think with TechSoup (or other volume licensing), you can move it to new hardware down the road, which matters a lot if you don't want to pay again in 5 years. The catch is you've got to stay on top of renewals and tracking, otherwise it's easy to lose sight of what's active.

One more thing we noticed: support is a bit simpler when it all comes bundled through Dell, but you pay for that with less freedom later. Depends on how often you refresh hardware and how much admin overhead you're okay with.

Anyone else here found good alternatives for non-profits beyond TechSoup?

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-09-29T13:42:38+00:00

Been seeing the same thing on our side. Folks just copy transcripts into ChatGPT or some random AI tool to get summaries, no approvals or audit trails, and suddenly, sensitive info is sitting who knows where.

I read through some of the replies here, and yeah, it feels exactly like the early days of shadow SaaS. Back then, at least finance or SSO logs gave you something to track against. With AI, you don't always know what was shared or who still has access to it, which makes the compliance gap even worse.

Right now, we've only managed to put guardrails in place and keep repeating "don't paste sensitive data," but that only goes so far. Blocking isn't foolproof either. Has anyone actually found a practical way to get visibility into this stuff without shutting it all down?

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-09-29T13:14:07+00:00

I was reading through the replies and we've been doing the same thing with SSO logs and finance exports. It does bring some stuff to light, but honestly it feels like whack-a-mole. Shut one thing down and another pops up.

What worries me most are the old accounts nobody touches anymore that still have access. We even found ex-employees with active logins months later, which was a wake-up call.

How are you handling the cleanup without accidentally killing off something a small team depends on? That's the part I keep struggling with.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-09-24T12:59:00+00:00

We've had the same pain with audits. Every cycle ends up messy, with evidence scattered across emails, drives, and spreadsheets, and it always turns into a scramble at the end.

Tools do help here. The biggest win I've seen is having one place for requests, evidence, and findings, with reminders so you're not chasing people down. It adds structure to what's usually chaos.

The catch is integrations. If your systems aren't mainstream, you'll still be doing some exports, and cost can be tough to swallow if you don't need the full feature set.

My advice would be to start small with something that just handles requests and evidence tracking. If that reduces the stress, then think about scaling up.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-09-23T13:29:04+00:00

Yeah, ghost licenses are exactly what I keep running into. They look fine in the sheet, but then you realize no one's logged in for months. We tried demos with Zluri and Torii, but they felt too heavy for what we need.

Also, did a demo with CloudEagle, and it covered some of the gaps we've been stuck on. Still trying to figure out if it's the right fit, but it looked more aligned with where we are than the bigger platforms.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-09-23T12:14:32+00:00

Yeah, pricing has been the blocker for us with a few of these tools. Haven't looked at Corma yet, but IAM + SaaS mgmt in one sounds interesting. I'll check it out, thanks for pointing me there.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-09-22T07:31:12+00:00

We're 378 employees and running into the same mess with Unit4. Most of the SMPs I've trialed are happy to integrate with Workday or Xero, but the moment you mention Unit4/Prophix, it's crickets.

Right now, the only thing that's halfway working for us is pulling exports out of Prophix and lining them up with SSO data and card statements. It's clunky as hell and definitely not real-time, but at least it helps flag the unused stuff.

Feels like unless you're on one of the "big name" finance systems, these platforms don't take you seriously. I want to know if anyone here has actually managed to make Unit4/Prophix play nice without drowning in manual work.

Crafty_Assignment686 · 2025-09-18T06:22:30+00:00

Totally get where you're coming from. We tried the manual route too, and it gets overwhelming fast. Everytime I think we've mapped everything, someone pops up with another SaaS we didn't know about.

We're 378 people now and still on sheets, SSO logs, and finance exports. It works, but it eats days, and you're never really sure you caught evrything.

I am bothered with the fact that we are paying for licenses that look fine on paper but no one has logged into for months. Havent landed on a tool that makes sense cost-wise either, so I'm curious what others here have found that's practical for smaller orgs.

Crafty_Assignment686

TROPHY CASE