Before deployment: intuition, risk modelling, regulatory mapping. After: production metrics, drift detection, real user behaviour. Governance is never finished — it's a feedback loop, not a deliverable.
Treating governance as a dynamic tool means the framework evolves with the system it governs: acceptance thresholds adjust, supervision levels shift, authorised use cases get refined as the production reality becomes clearer.
Concrete example — governance-driven routing
A summarisation task configured with confidentiality and traceability criteria automatically routes to a different model than the same task with relaxed constraints. The governance profile is the routing logic — no manual override, no separate config.
Implemented in the side project: use case × criteria matrix stored in Redis, resolved at inference time.