Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design (2015)

PART I

Making a Digital Governance Framework

CHAPTER 7

Getting It Done

Identifying a Sponsor and an Advocate

Populating the Design Team

Starting the Design Effort

At Last—Implementing the Framework

Summary

The governance framework design effort is a good opportunity for your organization’s digital stakeholders to learn how to work and collaborate better. So, even if you already have a sense of who on your digital team ought to have the authority to make decisions related to digital strategy, policy, and standards, it’s still important to go through the design effort with a larger team. Because it’s not just the end state that is important, but rather the interim conversation, collaboration, and compromise required to build your framework. Those activities will bring your team into better communication, better community, and better alignment.

Most importantly, in environments where effective digital governance practices haven’t been implemented, the de facto core digital team is often in an uncomfortable position. In many cases, they are struggling to produce a functioning digital presence in a chaotic development environment, with no real authority to define and enforce standards. These teams are hungry for authority, tired, frustrated, and feel (and often are) underappreciated. That’s not the best dynamic for defining governance practice. So, even if you are a key stakeholder with a lot of institutional knowledge and digital domain expertise, it’s important to remember that creating a digital governance framework is not an opportunity to create another functional, decision-making silo. Instead, take the time to do the job right. It will be well worth the effort.

There are four main aspects to consider when creating the digital design framework:

• Identifying a sponsor and an advocate.

• Populating the design team.

• Starting the design effort.

• Implementing the framework.

Identifying a Sponsor and an Advocate

There are a lot of unique organizational nuances to digital governance, but one common theme is that, without a sponsor or an advocate, digital governance frameworks are often defined but seldom implemented. So, if you are not in a capacity to implement your framework through your own authority, make sure that you seek alignment with someone in your organization who does have the capacity to recommend or implement the sometimes substantive changes that can occur when digital governance frameworks are put into action (see Figure 7.1).

FIGURE 7.1
Pick someone to lead the team.

The advocacy role can sometimes be a tough role to fill. As you’ll learn in Chapter 8, “The Decision To Govern Well,” sometimes leadership isn’t really eager to establish formal digital governance. Often, they can’t see, don’t understand, or in some extreme circumstances, aren’t even open to hearing about the benefits and risk-mitigating dynamics of proper digital governance. Even in these extreme circumstances, every digital governance success story—the ones with the happy ending of a well-funded, well-formed, properly empowered digital team—includes the existence of an executive advocate. Sometimes the advocate takes a heavy interest and participates in the governance framework formation. At other times, the advocate simply writes the memo that announces the framework. Either of these levels of participations (and anything in between) can be effective if your advocate is well-selected because often just the basic imprimatur of a person “in charge” is all that is needed to get your framework implementation started and completed.

FIGURE 7.2
Digital governance framework sponsorship and advocacy.

So, let’s consider the only line on your framework grid that is likely left blank: “Governance Sponsorship and Advocacy” (see Figure 7.2). At this juncture, consider who in your organization has the authority to make the changes required to support your new digital governance framework. It might be an individual, an executive, or maybe a senior management committee. Who the advocate is will vary greatly from organization to organization, but usually the resource is very senior.

Depending on the sector in which an organization operates, there are certain trends that become evident surrounding the person who becomes an advocate and sponsor (see Table 7.1). Often, this selection stems from how revenue is driven into the organization, or it’s based on legacy (pre-digital) roles in the organization, or what part of the organization already has control of or drives digital.

Your digital governance advocate’s first task will be to form the digital governance framework design team.

TABLE 7.1 TYPICAL DIGITAL GOVERNANCE ADVOCATES

When the CIO and CMO Don’t Want to Change

One of the most effective things an organization can do is to colocate its complete core digital team to report to a single manager. But housing writers in IT or graphical application developers in marketing feels really wrong to some organizations—often because the senior management doesn’t have the knowledge to manage or direct these resources. However, you have to ask yourself 20 years into the Web, is that a good reason to compromise the quality of digital?

The complete rift between these two teams might have made more sense when IT was building client-server applications for its internal customers, and there were years between client interface updates. But to support an ever-changing dynamic digital presence, organizations should consider that it might be time to bring these teams closer together. Shouldn’t organizations demand broader competence from their chief marketing and chief information officers? Or is digital important enough in your organization that you need a stand-alone digital team led by a very senior manager—perhaps a peer of the chief marketing or chief information officer? All those models are viable, but trying to shoehorn digital into the narrowness of pre-Web organizational structures will probably not lead to the best outcome.

Populating the Design Team

Don’t underestimate the value and effect of a properly sponsored and formed design team. The governance design team often becomes a powerful entity within an organization. In many instances, the framework design team will transform itself into the digital strategy team. So it’s important to get the leadership and membership right. Beware of self-selected digital governance design teams populated with only core digital team stakeholders, because they are likely to be seen as self-serving and their efforts, however sound, are often largely disregarded.

Team Leadership

You’ll probably find that getting the design effort off the ground is the most difficult task. While your digital governance sponsor and advocate will be an essential voice for the initial call to action for the organization and for approving and emplacing the final framework, it is unlikely that such a high-level resource will have the time (or tactical expertise) to lead the design effort. Usually, digital governance efforts have been effectively led by core Web team leads, marketing officers, COOs, and CIOs. But there’s no definitive answer here. It’s not so much about the title as it is about ensuring that those who lead the design effort have a broad and balanced perspective regarding the full range of digital properties being governed. Consequently, that means that resources who work in a particular silo of the organization and have a narrow interest or agenda might not be a good pick.

DO’S AND DON’TS

DO: Get executive sponsorship for your digital governance framework efforts. While you can define roles and responsibilities for digital, usually, you can’t give yourself authority over others in your organization without the support of your executive team.

Sometimes, the head of the de facto core digital team self-selects as the leader of the design team. That can be a strong choice, but sometimes this leader is not the most open-minded. Often, the core digital team lead has an ax to grind when it comes to digital standards being upheld, and it might see the governance design effort as an opportunity to focus power. In situations where there is a lot of contention and debate between the core digital team and other organizational stakeholders, designating the core team leader can appear to be more of a declaration of war than the olive branch that the organization needs to foster more positive collaboration.

So, be careful in these sorts of situations. If this resource does end up leading the design team, make an extra effort to create an environment where all voices can be heard. On paper, the outcome might be the same (a lot of decision making regarding standards in the core Web team), but the process used to reach the outcome can be the difference between a fun collaborative work environment and one where the work dynamic take a passive aggressive tone.

Do You Need Outside Support, or Can You Do It Alone?

Your organization can develop its own digital governance framework without outside support, but it’s not a side job. You need to dedicate resource time to it, just as you would a website redesign or technology replatform. So, if you don’t have time to do your framework properly, you might need support outside of your team and leadership. That support can be simple administrative support, such as organizing meetings, taking minutes, and following up with members on action items. Or you might need a facilitator to help drive the process forward and keep the team on track.

If you do use a facilitator, be sure that the person you choose is knowledgeable about digital and can be objective about the dynamics of the organization. Sometimes, you can find a facilitator from the administrative side of your organization, while other times you’ll need to use an external resource. You might also need to seek additional support if the following conditions occur:

• Your organization has a lot of dysfunction or a contentious dynamic has developed around digital development.

• Your business is forced into assembling a large digital governance design team due to organizational dynamics.

• Attempts to establish a digital governance framework have failed repeatedly.

Team Membership

Your design team must be able to have meaningful and fluid conversation in real time. That means that people who can answer important questions such as: “Can we move the digital team from marketing to IT?” or “Can we change the way we budget for digital?” need to be in the room while you are designing. If you have to leave the room and follow up with managers to get context around and answers to these sorts of questions, your team is not properly resourced. Likewise, if no one in the room can speak strategically to information and technical architectures, user experience, content strategy, and digital analytics, your team is not properly resourced.

Sometimes, an organization might have an existing team in place that can be leveraged to support the governance design effort. If that is the case, as a best practice, try leveraging that team first before forming a new one. The result you are looking for is a governance framework—not the establishment of a redundant administrative or working group.

To foster real-time conversation, you won’t want a large group. But, at the same time, you want to make sure that no aspect of your organization is excluded in the design process. And, as with your strategy definition team, you have to strike a balance between digital domain expertise and organizational expertise. For a lot of organizations, forming a small team that meets all of these criteria is a challenge. In principal, a team sponsored by one or two leadership figures (like the CIO or CMO) and populated by the core digital team lead(s) and strategic digital business stakeholders (like regional Web managers or brand or business line Web managers) is a good place to start. From there, you might want to add non-obvious members, like those from your legal department or operations. But, already, if you include all of these resources, your design team might be getting too large to be effective.

A productive tactic is to form a working group aligned with an already existing cross-functional executive team that represents the organization in full. The working group can be tasked to define the framework and carry it back to the senior group for codification. This less inclusive process is most effective if the group chartering the working group has broad perspective over the organization and is willing to make sure that all key digital stakeholders are able to provide input and voice their concerns (much like the inputs and decisions exercise you use when establishing standards).

Once your framework design team leadership and membership is established, your advocate can announce the digital governance framework initiative and the team’s mission and agenda, and the governance framework design effort can begin in earnest.

Starting the Design Effort

You have an advocate and a sponsor, a design team has been formed, and the governance initiative has been announced to the organization. Now, you are ready to start your design effort in earnest. How do you get the work done? Because the results of the lack of digital governance are broad, deep, and pervasive (and usually uncomfortable), it’s easy to believe that coming up with the solution will take a lot of effort over an extended period of time and be just as disconcerting. That doesn’t have to be the case. If your framework design team is inclusive and the design effort is done with a spirit of collaboration, designing a framework can be a relatively simple task. There are a few measures you can put in place to ensure that happens.

Understand Your Digital Landscape

Sometimes, organizations are in such disarray digitally that they really don’t understand the fundamental landscape of their digital presence. Before you get started assigning accountability and authority, you’ll need to pursue a level of information gathering and analysis. For instance, you’ll need to gather and understand information like the following:

• Organizational structure and reporting chains

• Inventory of website domains, mobiles applications, and social software accounts

• Content inventories and Web page editorial responsibilities

• Any documented digital policy

• Any documented digital standards

• Style guides and best practices

• Digital analytics to understand online usage patterns

• Online survey results, usability study results, and so on

Don’t worry! Most digital teams don’t have this information at their fingertips. So it’s important to retrieve the information before you start, because having this sort of information at hand will help your team answer fundamental questions while designing the framework. Usually, the framework design team can create a working group to gather this information and provide it to the team. Most likely, the head of the core digital team will play a large role in this information gathering process, but be sure to include other stakeholders in this process. It’s a better scenario for the team to retrieve more information than they need and discard it during the design process rather than to find out after you’ve created a design that it does not take into account all of the use cases for digital in your organization.

DO’S AND DON’TS

DON’T: Forget to consider the scope of your framework before you get started. Sometimes teams can be hyper-focused on governing one aspect of an organization’s online presence, like websites, while ignoring others, like social channels.

How Long Will It Take?

A digital governance framework design effort can take as little or as much time as you’d like. The decision is yours. Usually, the amount of time an organization chooses to take with its design effort has a lot to do with how critical the effort is. If your design effort is taking place in the wake of some online mess, such as improper content, security breaches, or other negative attention, then it can be fast. If there is no real drive to get it done, then it can end up being a long, drawn-out process. It’s your organization’s decision. Organizations that are serious about governing well move quickly—organizations that aren’t as serious, less so. Those statements have shown themselves to be true in organizations large and small, so size doesn’t matter. You can get it done quickly if you’re serious.

That said, digital governance frameworks are not complicated, but the office politics behind them can be. If you work in a highly politicized organization, working through the organizational dynamics can add a lot of time to your effort. A well-formed design team with strong leadership can help minimize side debates about authority and power. But, if there has been a lot of disagreement about the digital presence and who has authority to make decisions, some of that debate will spill over into the design process. So plan accordingly.

Table 7.2 should help you understand the basic activities in the design effort and give you a sense of how long these activities will take. Use this as a guide, not a rule. Every organization is different. Some businesses make decisions slowly and others more quickly. For example, it’s possible for a massive global corporation to make all the decisions in the table during a single two-day offsite, or a small non-profit might deliberate over the same set of decisions over the course of a year.

TABLE 7.2 GOVERNANCE TASKS AND TIME COMMITMENT

Typically, teams that get the best results are the ones that commit concentrated time to the effort. In reality, designing the framework is often the first constructive cross-organizational collaboration that members of the digital team have been engaged in. A lot of important conversations that perhaps should have happened over the years often do happen in these design meetings, so the best results won’t be achieved as effectively in a series of short hour-long meetings scattered over several months. Ideally, a two-day offsite is the most effective way of developing a framework—or at least for getting most of the way there. If that’s not going to happen in your organization, try to create the same intensity in your office or at least in a series of half-day meetings that happen not less than a week apart.

Many organizations feel that they have deep governance concerns when in reality they simply haven’t taken the time to sit down and talk things through. Or, if they do sit down and talk about them, it’s in the middle of a project where there are timelines and other pressing concerns that can skew perspectives. A happy occurrence is that often teams find out during their design process that they are in deep alignment regarding digital governance practices—once they actually sit down and talk about it outside of the context of projects and deadlines. Your digital governance frameworks will become the foundation of your digital operations. Make the time to do your best work.

At Last—Implementing the Framework

Your design team has done its job, and you have an agreed-upon framework for digital authority and decision making in your organization. Congratulations! But this is just the beginning. Now you need to implement your design. And, even more so than the design itself, the implementation will be highly specific to your organization.

Remember that your framework design document is a schematic of how things ought to work. It takes people to move the schematic from theory into practice. At this point, it’s important not to lose momentum from the design phase of governance to the implementation phase. It’s a fact that too many governance framework design efforts never take hold simply because they were never implemented. Perhaps the team putting the design together felt that the existence of a framework document somehow made it a reality. Or sometimes the governance team didn’t have the authority or resources to implement the changes they had devised. These types of challenges can be mitigated with proper sponsorship.

DO’S AND DON’TS

DO: Remember that the implementation of your digital governance framework begins with the process that you use to define it. Make sure that your process is one that resonates with digital stakeholders in your organization.

DO’S AND DON’TS

DON’T: Try to assert authority over digital stakeholders and colleagues during the framework-design process—keep it collaborative.

If the changes from your de facto governance model to your formal model are minimal, the tactics of the implementation can be simple. But if the changes are deeper, you may need to develop a formal implantation plan and enlist the help from those with expertise in organizational change management. However, be forewarned—because this is a slightly simplistic view, a small organizational change can cause a big reaction among staff members. For instance, those who work in digital have assumed authority for aspects of digital, and sometimes after the framework design process, they find that they no longer have the same authority. Perhaps the resources that do get authority and accountability for certain aspects of digital find that they aren’t interested in having authority over these areas. Again, this is why it’s important to have a well-formed design team and to consider the following when implementing your framework.

• Formally emplace the framework. If you’ve selected your framework sponsor well, this resource should be at a senior enough level of the organization to formally initiate the implementation of any changes in position or authority that your framework recommends. Make sure that happens. A document doesn’t make a change. In the simplest case, a communication to relevant parties can suffice. In more sophisticated cases, job descriptions may need to be rewritten, budgetary authority for certain aspects of digital shifted, or perhaps a new digital division created. In some cases when the changes in management accountability and roles are truly significant, a formal change-management strategy might need to be defined and implemented. Sometimes, digital team members (used to a fast-paced, agile work environment) don’t fully appreciate the effort required in changing the work dynamics of a large organization. Sometimes, governance shifts can take a year or more to implement.

• Communicate. One of the biggest differentiators between organizations that succeed in improving their digital governance practices and those that don’t is how effectively they communicate the new framework to the organization. The framework design document is not the end point but a way station in the process of implementing formal governance. In most frameworks, there will be newly established working groups and communities of practice set into place to make decisions about digital and to communicate those decisions to the larger organization—or, in some cases, to help inform key digital stakeholders regarding best practices.

• Make a distinction between digital production and digital governance. Your digital governance framework is just that—a framework for decision making. It should not be applied to day-to-day production. For instance, just because your core digital team might be responsible for establishing editorial standards doesn’t mean that they have to approve every piece of content that goes on the site. It means that the standards author is responsible for defining the substance of the editorial standard and helping to support an environment where those standards are easy to uphold. Don’t confuse the two. You might develop more tactical levels of governance, like content governance or taxonomy governance, but those are different, more production-focused activities than what have been described in this book.

BRAIN TRAFFIC—DIGITAL GOVERNANCE AND CONTENT

Kristina Halvorson

If we’re going to treat our “information assets” as such, we need to create and publish digital content as though it were a disposable commodity. There’s a reason we talk about content going “live”—once it’s out there, if we don’t take care of it, it will die on the vine. Redundant, outdated, trivial, irrelevant, off-brand, inaccurate ... there are a million ways content can go bad. When we establish and practice true governance, we build a common framework for content management across silos that give us guardrails and guidelines for maintaining our content’s integrity over time and across platforms.

Summary

• There are four aspects to consider when creating your digital governance framework. They are identifying a sponsor and advocate; populating the design team; overseeing the design effort; and implementing the framework.

• Identifying a sponsor and advocate for your design effort is crucial. The advocate will ensure that the framework can be implemented in the organization. Sometimes it’s difficult to find a leader to fill this role because leadership can be relatively disconnected from digital, particularly when the relationship of digital to the bottom line is not straightforward.

• The digital governance framework design team should be led by a resource who is able to maintain objectivity regarding the roles and responsibilities for digital. The framework design team itself should be inclusive. The design team lead should ensure that all aspects of the organization are represented on the team or that all aspects of the organization are consulted during the design process.

• The design phase has six aspects: information gathering and preparation; defining the digital team; identifying digital strategy, accountability, and authority; identifying digital policy stewardship and authorship; determining digital standards stewardship; and conducting standards inputs and decisions exercises.

• It is important to formally emplace your framework after it has been designed. That includes formally implementing the framework, as well as making sure the substance of the framework is effectively communicated to all relevant stakeholders in your organization. It is important to be clear that a digital governance framework is not a production model. Standard operating procedures and workflow processes may still need to be developed to support day-to-day digital production.