of excellence is beginning to emerge, although it may not have all of the desired authority.
Summary
• Digital governance is a framework for establishing accountability, roles, and decision-making authority for an organization’s digital presence. It addresses three topics: strategy, policy, and standards.
• Digital strategy articulates the organization’s approach to leveraging the capabilities of the Internet and World Wide Web. It is authored by those who can evaluate the impact of digital on your marketspace and come up with an effective strategy for success.
• Digital policies are guidance statements put into place to manage the organizational risk inherent with operating online. They should be informed by digital, organizational, and legal experts.
• Digital standards are guidance statements for developing the organizational digital presence. They should be informed and defined by subject matter experts.
• A digital governance framework delegates authority for digital decision-making about particular digital products and services from the organizational core to other aspects of the organization. This allows the organization to effectively decentralize production maintenance of its digital presence.
CHAPTER 2
Your Digital Team: Where They Are and What They Do
Committees, Councils, and Working Groups
Exercise: Establishing Your Field
I’m a real fan of music—any kind of music, as long as it’s got some soul to it to. But, if I had to play favorites, I’d have to say that I like symphony orchestras and small jazz ensembles the most. In my mind, they represent two ends of the musical spectrum—like the yin and yang of music. Jazz seems on the surface to be highly unstructured and free. Alternately, orchestral music has a reputation for being really prescribed and controlled. But it’s not that simple. Embedded in each of these styles of music is its inverse—so, orchestral music at its best can be wildly evocative and free, and improvisational jazz, that sounds so unformed, usually operates over a mathematical grid of tonality. Thus, the symphony has the emotional richness we associate easily with jazz music, and within jazz lies the discipline we associate with orchestral music, as shown in Figure 2.1.
FIGURE 2.1 The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Time for Three perform at Carnegie Hall’s Spring for Music festival.
But, if you look at the interactions and artifacts required for a typical hour’s worth of quality jazz versus an hour’s worth of quality orchestral music, you’ll see a big difference. Jazz musicians might have a few lead sheets, which detail the melody of a tune and its basic harmonic framework, whereas the orchestral conductor is faced with a relatively thick score, usually marked up with further notes and cues. Jazz musicians might have a 10-minute conversation before they start their gig, but a symphony orchestra may spend an afternoon or more starting and stopping a piece, paying close attention to the tricky parts where the group might stumble over each other. And, even before the orchestra musicians get together to rehearse, various orchestral sections may get together to work through concerns related to their section, like bowing strategies for string players. It’s not an accident that all the bows in a violin section all move together!
In the end, both the jazz trio and the orchestra can deliver a powerful performance that satisfies the audience. And both groups rely on the competence and expertise of individual musicians. The difference lies in the fact that one group makes it up as they go along and sees where it takes them, while the other one doesn’t. It’s a different means to an end and that means is dictated by one thing primarily—the size of the group involved. It’s easier to get three or four people to collaborate and invent in real time than it is to get 100 people to do so.
It’s likely that your organization’s early Web team was like a jazz trio—that is, a group of highly engaged people with special skills working on one website and making things up as they went along. And it worked—for a while. Now, 15 or 20 years later, an organization might have 10, 100, or 500 people and an array of external support vendors putting in effort to support their digital presence. And, instead of websites being an interesting business oddity, they have become mission critical. Only the problem is that no one has taken the time to mature and intentionally form the digital team that supports those sites—to identify who all those resources are, where they are in the organization,
