Small fix, big governance signal
Published August 22, 2025
Sometimes the biggest governance signals show up in the smallest fixes.
I was reviewing scenario usage when one stood out: operations were off the charts compared to everything else. Digging in, I found a scenario labeled “one-time execution” that had been running continuously from early May until discovery in mid-August. By then, it had quietly burned through ~15 million operations.
The fix was trivial — stop the scenario. But the real issue wasn’t the runaway logic. It was what it revealed:
- No mechanism to enforce execution intent (a “one-time” process can run forever).
- No monitoring to flag abnormal usage before it ballooned.
- No shared governance between teams working in the same automation layer — promotion, scope, and ownership were unaligned.
A simple operations threshold alert or approval step before promotion would have caught this in days, not months. Without those guardrails, a single misstep consumed millions of operations unchecked.
Takeaway: Small failures expose governance weaknesses that scale into larger costs.
Have you seen automation patterns drift out of control?