being dealt with by the communications or marketing team, and the application design and network and server infrastructure work is being handled by IT.
Keeping the Core Whole
Because of the core team’s foundational role, ideally, it should not be scattered across multiple aspects of the organization. But, in practice, this is often not the case. In many organizations, the core digital team is bifurcated—with one main branch in the IT department and the other main branch in marketing, communications, or public relations. The reasons for this common split are obvious: a digital presence is a content-rich communications-focused series of channels that exist on a technology platform. Sometimes, in organizations with a transactional focus, the split can be two- or three-fold with other key stakeholder’s organizations playing a strong core role.
Organizations should make an effort to overcome these legacy patterns and integrate digital resources on one team. Collaboration models where teams are distributed across the organizations and reporting to multiple managers can work, but for the core, it’s especially important to foster close, spontaneous, and inventive collaboration—like that of the jazz ensemble—and this is best served when resources are co-located.
The Dispersed Core
If you work in a large organization or an organization that has vastly different product or business interests, the responsibilities of the core team may need to be dispersed. In these instances, multiple cores take on the same program and product management responsibilities as the corporate core team but for only a particular aspect of the digital presence, like an area of the organizational website or a brand-focused site or microsite.
For instance, in a holding company that has multiple brands and multiple websites, the core digital team’s standards decision-making may be minimal with the bulk being delegated to individual brands or businesses. Sometimes, this delegation of authority can be so complete that the brand- or program-focused teams have complete authority over all the content, applications, and back-end systems that support digital. Another rationale for distributing core team functions might be localization requirements. While digital content is often translated from one language to another, sometimes digital products and services must be more deeply localized to align with business and cultural norms.
Often, in these deeply dispersed models, various brands, products, and programs have developed their own local digital governance concerns. For example, a product line that has been given authority to develop standards for its own product might delegate standards development authority to different geographical regions. When practices like these begin to emerge, the organization begins to develop a governance structure that resembles a network array with nodes of authority delegated from the core to brands, programs, or product lines of the organization (see Figure 2.3).
FIGURE 2.3 The dispersed core team.
This model, if well-designed, can be very powerful because it allows the top-level organization to dictate policy and standards in the areas where uniformity makes sense, while at the same time allowing brands and locales to have their own digital policy and standards as required to maximize business effectiveness.
The Clorox Company is an example of an organization where the vast majority of digital standards definitions (and corporate brand standards in general) might need to be delegated from the corporate core into specific brands. At the same time, some policy definition authority is still held at the Clorox corporate level (see Figure 2.4
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