Managing Chaos. Lisa Welchman
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About the Author
FOREWORD
Iremember well the day I pitched Cisco’s senior staff on leveraging the Web for all our business processes and for creating an organization, job descriptions, and clear roles and responsibilities to support our Web efforts. They agreed, looked around the room, and said, “Which group should do it? (It could have been IT, customer service, or marketing.) Someone said, well, Sinton (marketing), you do it. And that was that. A clear decision, at least in the beginning, and the desktop PC (!) that housed Cisco’s website was delivered outside my office along with the person managing it.
And we were off and running—soon envisioning Cisco as a global networked business where the Web improved relationships for all of our business constituents (prospects, customers, investors, suppliers, employees, etc.). It was somewhat easy at first to maintain the “presentation layer” (now called UX) and core functions, such as registration databases, content management, and search. We built them from scratch and had a mandate from our CEO to manage them. Cisco’s embrace of the Web as a core business strategy was both a strength and a weakness. With so much “embracing,” there began turf wars and disintegration that played out, sometimes very clearly, on the customer, employee, and partner websites.
We were developing a new tool for business while working in the fastest growing company of the 1990s. It was chaos, and it became clear that top-down, cross-functional and international coordination was needed to effectively deliver on the promise of the Web. And so we began to experiment with governance models, ultimately landing upon a lead “business council” with supporting cross-functional teams at various levels to help our work be more effective. This business council had at its core an alliance between marketing and IT.
This solved some of our challenges, but not all. Clearly, Cisco was ahead of its time in leveraging the Web for business. In 1996, 20–25% of all Web commerce was done on cisco.com, yet we struggled as we continued to scale, decentralize, and globalize our business. We learned, over time, that it takes the full width and breadth of the organization to support the company’s digital efforts, and that it needs to be addressed and coordinated at many levels of the organization from executive to individual contributors.
If only we’d had this book as we blazed that trail, we could have been even more productive and even more customer focused. I’m so thankful that someone as brilliant as Lisa recognized what was happening, both at a tactical and at an organizational development level, and wrote about it. I still believe in the power of the Web to change the way we live, work, play, and learn. Hopefully, Lisa’s insights in the area of digital governance will help even more companies unlock that power and potential.
—Chris Sinton
Chair Emeritus StartOut Co-Founder and Founding President & CEO Network for Good
Internet Trailblazer Cisco Systems
INTRODUCTION
The organizational manifestation of digital governance problems can lead to complicated outcomes like power struggles and other negative competitive behavior in organizations. This is nothing new for organizations, but with the advent of the World Wide Web and Internet, those power struggles now manifest themselves publically and online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Many executives and digital leaders assume that this manifestation of chaos is just the state of affairs for digital. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Managing Chaos seeks to address digital governance challenges by offering a practical methodology for calming and clarifying roles and responsibilities of digital development. Digital will never be “simple.” The very nature of the digital beast implies complexity—complexity in delivery and complexity in the teams that innovate, develop, and manage digital functionality. With all that complexity, proceeding without some clarity of roles and responsibilities is unlikely to lead to success.
As Vint Cerf, inventor of the Internet said: “Every possible bad thing that can happen in the real world can now happen on the Internet.”1 That means that organizations need to put into place governing principles that maximize the good things that happen and minimize the bad. Managing Chaos offers a framework in which that optimization can occur.
PART I
Making a Digital Governance Framework
This section contains the fundamentals required to develop a digital governance framework and includes basic definitions, practical guidelines for development, and some of the dynamics that need to be taken into consideration when designing an organizational digital governance framework.
CHAPTER 1
The Basics of Digital Governance
Your Digital Governance: How Bad Is It?
In 1995, when my son was eight months old (Figure 1.1), I packed up my family and moved to Silicon Valley to work with 500 Startups’ Dave McClure’s very first start-up, Aslan Computing. Dave had sent me a 14.4 modem and an HTML book as a baby shower gift, and coding Web pages was a good stay-at-home-mom job. At Aslan, we coded pages for the Netscape website. We invented out-of-the-box website building tools with names like “Ready, Intranet, Go!” We figured out how to manage an ISO 9001 certification process online and built lots of websites for dotcoms, most of which rose and fell quickly in the stew pot of 1990s Silicon Valley.
FIGURE 1.1 Baby Welchman circa 1995.
Late in 1996, I took a job at Cisco Systems, managing the product pages for its website (see Figure 1.2). The site was huge for its time (200K+ HTML pages), and the Web team was relatively small. There was the main site, “Cisco Connection Online,” as well as various “country pages.” Cisco was getting recognition for being a leader in ecommerce, and folks like Jan Johnston Tyler and Chris Sinton were doing pioneering work in multichannel content delivery. The whole Cisco ship was being steered by John Chambers.
Back then, corporate