and how the whole team should work together as a unit. Just as there are a lot of different ensemble configurations between the small intimacy of the jazz ensemble and the top-down, highly structured orchestra, there are many different types of digital team configurations. Your job is to discover which configuration will work best for your organization so that you have an appropriate canvas upon which to execute your digital governance design work
The real work of a digital governance framework is to assign appropriate authority for digital strategy, policy, and standards decision-making to the right resources within your digital team. But, if you have no sense of where your team members are or what they do, it is almost impossible to assign digital governance authority properly. Let’s take a look at your digital team
What Is Your Digital Team?
Your digital team is the full set of resources required to keep the digital process functioning for your organization. Your digital team includes not just the core product-focused teams found in marketing/communications and IT, but also the casual content contributors, business unit Web managers, supporting software vendors, and organizational agencies of record. Your digital team also includes those who administer and support digital efforts by tending to the programmatic aspects of the digital team, such as budget digital team resource development and management.
DO’S AND DON’TS
DON’T: Worry too much about whether your core digital team is in marketing, communications, or IT (or anywhere else in your organization). Clearly defined roles and authority are much more important than the organizational placement of your core team.
Unfortunately, many organizations identify their digital teams as only the hands-on resources that design, write, and post Web content and create applications on a daily basis. This narrow view of the digital team reinforces the idea that digital is a tactical function and not a strategic one that requires planning and resource management. It also minimizes the deep information and technical architectural issues that must be addressed in order to do digital well and safely for your organization and your users. With a broader perspective of your digital team, it becomes clear that your team is all over your organization, and there comes the realization that there is a diversity of skills required to support digital. Some of those skills existed in your organization prior to digital, and some of the skills are new. Some skills are specifically related to digital expertise, and some of them are related to other domains.
An easy way to get a handle on your digital team is to consider the following (see Figure 2.2):
• The location, role, and budgeting source of your core digital team.
• The location, roles, and budgeting source for your distributed digital team, which can include departmental Web managers, country Web managers, product-focused content contributors, and other satellite teams.
• The authority, role, and budgeting source of any digital steering committees, councils, and working groups.
• The identity of and budgeting source for your extended digital team, which includes agencies of record, software integrators, and other external vendor support.
FIGURE 2.2 Components of your digital team.
Once these aspects are clearly understood, you will have established a clear resource field upon which to place decision-making authority. Now, let’s look at each aspect of your team in more depth.
NOTE LIKE MAKES LIKE
Well-organized, effective digital teams usually produce a well-organized and effective digital presence. Conversely, a poorly organized, inefficient digital team usually produces a poorly organized and ineffective digital presence. The main product of digital team disorganization is redundancy of effort, which can lead to things like a bad user experience through conflicting interface and application design standards, or fiscal waste through the implementation of duplicitous back-end systems.
Your Core Team
The core digital team’s job is to conceptualize, architect, and oversee the full organizational digital presence. In most organizations, the core digital team is the set of resources you most likely called the “Web team.” In an environment where digital governance is immature, this team often has de facto authority over digital standards—that is, until a powerful stakeholder disagrees with them. Often, they are in either marketing/communications or your IT department. But technically speaking, the team can be anywhere in the organization. The core team has many responsibilities that can be distilled into two functions: program management and product management.
DO’S AND DON’TS
DON’T: Try to run your 100-person digital operation as a loose collaboration. Make sure that roles and responsibilities are well defined and that you have bridging functions cutting across working silos.
Core Team Program Management
NOTE PROGRAM MANAGEMENT RESPONSIBILITIES
• Oversees local and global digital staff and budget.
• Implements digital strategy.
• Measures and reports on the effectiveness of digital initiatives
• Informs and authors digital policy.
• Builds and sustains internal digital community of practice.
Program management is the administrative side of digital. Its function is to enable the digital process by ensuring that the digital team is properly resourced, which includes the management of staff, vendors, and capital expenditures. The program management function also oversees the tactical evaluation of the digital team and digital platform performance, in essence measuring how effectively they have implemented the organization’s digital strategy.
Core digital team program management resources are an important and often missing link between hands-on digital workers and the rest of the organization. Program management resources offer jargon-free, quantitative and qualitative evidence to leadership in order to garner fiscal and strategic support for the growing resource needs of the digital team. Unfortunately, many organizations have a weak digital program management function. For some, tactics for the measurement of digital performance are elementary with a focus on website page hits and social media “likes” instead of on things like related fiscal business performance and user experience metrics. Usually, no one in the organization has a clear understanding of what is being invested in digital. Often, digital efforts are sustained by the non-strategic leaching of human and fiscal resources from communications and IT budgets. A result of that is an often siloed approach to digital development. In many organizations, resources can be found for initiatives that center on communications or IT-focused tasks like content creation, visual identity, and systems platforms and application development, but the
