from debate-stalled stagnation around digital development and establish an environment where an entire organization can work together to successfully leverage all that digital has to offer.
What Is Digital Governance?
Digital governance is a framework for establishing accountability, roles, and decision-making authority for an organization’s digital presence—which means its websites, mobile sites, social channels, and any other Internet and Web-enabled products and services. Having a well-designed digital governance framework minimizes the number of tactical debates regarding the nature and management of an organization’s digital presence by making clear who on your digital team has decision-making authority for these areas:
• Digital strategy: Who determines the direction for digital?
• Digital policy: Who specifies what your organization must and must not do online?
• Digital standards: Who decides the nature of your digital portfolio?
When these questions are answered and your digital governance framework is well implemented by leadership, your organization can look forward to a more productive work environment for all digital stakeholders and a higher-quality, more effective digital presence.
The work of the framework is to clarify who the decision makers are, but in order to understand who should decide matters related to strategy, policy, and standards, it’s important first to understand what these things are.
Digital Strategy
A digital strategy articulates an organization’s approach to leveraging the capabilities of the Internet and the World Wide Web. A digital strategy has two facets: guiding principles and performance objectives.
• Guiding principles provide stakeholders with a streamlined, qualitative expression of your organization’s high-level digital business intent and values.
• Performance objectives quantitatively define what digital success means for an organization.
If your digital strategy is off target, then supporting policy, standards, and the process-related tactical machinations of your digital team will likely be off target as well. So when you are identifying who should establish digital strategy for your organization, it is especially important to include the right set of resources. That set should include the following:
• People who know how to analyze and evaluate the impact of digital in your marketspace.
• People who have the knowledge and ability to conceive an informed and visionary response to that impact.
• People who have the business expertise and authority to ensure that the digital vision is effectively implemented.
In most organizations, your digital strategy team will need to be a mix of executives and senior managers, business analysts, and your most senior digital experts. Luckily, identifying those resources is relatively easy. In fact, right now you could probably sit down and write down your “dream team” for establishing digital strategy. But that’s only half of the challenge. Often, the real digital strategy challenge is getting those resources to communicate and work together. The skill sets, experience, work styles, and business language of these two constituents can be very different, and the managerial distance between executives who mandate organizational change and digital experts who implement it can be great. In Chapter 3, “Digital Strategy: Aligning Expertise and Authority,” I will focus not only on selecting the right players for establishing digital strategy, but also on how to get that team aligned.
DO’S AND DON’TS
DO: Ensure that your digital strategy takes into account business considerations, as well as your organization’s culture toward digital. Not every organization needs to be a ground-breaking, digital go-getter.
Digital Policy
Digital policies are guidance statements put into place to manage risk and ensure that an organization’s core interests are served as it operates online. Think of policies as guardrails that keep the organization’s digital presence from going off the road.
The substance of digital policy should influence the behavior of employees when they are developing material for online channels. For example, the policy might specify that developers should not build applications that collect email addresses of children, because the company doesn’t want to violate their organization’s online privacy policy regarding children. Or perhaps content developers at a pharmaceutical company might be made aware of the differences in national policy as it relates to talking about the efficacy of their products online.
Because digital policy is a subset of corporate policy, it naturally inherits the corporate policy’s broad scope and diversity. Due to this scope and diversity, typically, a single individual or group cannot effectively author policy. This approach sometimes comes as a surprise to digital teams who feel that policy authorship falls naturally into their camp. That scenario occurs because organizations often conflate policy and standards; however, the two areas are not the same. Policies exist to protect the organization. They do not address online quality and how to achieve it—that is the role of standards.
A digital governance framework ought to designate a policy steward who is accountable for ensuring that all digital policy issues are addressed. Digital policy steward(s) should have a relatively objective, informed, and comprehensive view of the implications of digital for the organization. Digital policy authors are a diverse set of organizational resources who can contribute to and shape an appropriate organizational position for a given policy topic. In Chapter 4 “Staying on Track with Digital Policy,” I’ll go into more detail about the responsibilities of the policy steward and offer suggestions for which person or people ought to be authoring policy within organizations.
DO’S AND DON’TS
DON’T: Forget that digital policy is a subset of corporate policy and needs to be in harmony with other policies within your organization. For instance, digital policy is often informed by fiscal policy, IT policy, or vertical, market-focused external policy.
The Five Guiding Principles of Wikipedia1
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, which is written by the people who use it in many different languages, as you can see in Figure 1.4.
FIGURE 1.4 Wikipedia: an encyclopedia for the world.
The “Five Pillars” of Wikipedia (an online free encyclopedia) represent a great example of how to design guiding principles for an organization. These pillars/principles capture the culture, values, and goals of the organization as it relates to the Wikipedia digital properties, and they provide clear directions to the Wikipedia development community. They are as follows:
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
