The Infrastructure of High-Performing Partnerships

Most organizations are focused on transformation, AI, cost optimization, and innovation. None of those succeed without the right foundation. Governance is that foundation. It's what aligns stakeholders, manages risk, enables performance, and creates the conditions for long-term partnership success.

Join IAOP and our host, Avasant, in Washington, D.C. on October 14 for GOV26, a one-day forum where GBS and outsourcing professionals come together to explore the frameworks, relationships, technologies, and leadership practices that make high-performing partnerships possible.

Why This One Is Different

GOV26 is built around peer-to-peer learning. Not a stage, not a panel you watch from the back of a ballroom. A room of practitioners working through the same problems, in the open, with each other.

When we ran the governance workshop at OWS26 in Chicago, we opened the floor for questions and got more than thirty. We made it through six or seven. The exit planning conversation never even started. GOV26 exists because that room wasn't finished.

The knowledge in that room came from experience. It's not published, it's not indexed, and it isn't going to surface in a search. It exists in the heads of the people who lived it, and the only way to get at it is to put those people in a room together.

What We'll Get Into

AI as an assistant, not an autonomous agent. Where practitioners are actually getting value right now: contract interpretation, SOC report review, control weakness identification, early warning on service level risks. Where it consistently falls short, and why nobody in this space has a working autonomous agent yet.

Measuring what actually matters. Moving service level reporting from monthly to real time changes the value of the data. So does deciding what the data is for. There's a difference between generating a new metric to hold over a provider's head and generating information that helps everyone hit the business outcome.

Making the business case for governance tools. Some of the highest-value improvements never show up on a P&L. Compressed RFP cycles, faster onboarding, less manual review. If you've tried to get funding for something that saves eight hundred hours and can't be expressed in revenue, this session is for you.

Keeping the human in the loop. The tools make parts of the job easier and parts of it harder. Governance is still a relationship business, and the person accountable for the decision is still the person accountable for the decision.

Risk, exit, and the conversations nobody schedules. Risk evaluation, exit planning, and what happens when the contract was fine but nobody was tending to the relationship.

Who Should Be in the Room

Vendor and supplier management leaders. GBS and shared services executives. Sourcing and procurement practitioners. Legal and commercial advisors working in outsourcing. Anyone accountable for the health of a provider relationship after the ink dries.

Buyers and providers both. That mix is the point.

Before the Forum

We're running a virtual office hours session ahead of October 14, working through questions from the Chicago workshop that we never got to. Open discussion, cameras on, no slides. Details to come.

Space Is Limited

The format only works at a certain size, so the room is capped. Registration details and the full agenda are coming shortly.