Managing Chaos. Lisa Welchman
Читать онлайн книгу.
over content site “ownership,” graphics, social media moderation, and the maintenance websites?
• How many lawsuits, how many security breeches, and how many customers and employees do you have to annoy before you realize that governing your digital presence makes sense?
• What’s the bare minimum that needs to be controlled about your digital presence in order to manage risk, raise quality, and still allow different aspects of the organization the flexibility they need?
Isn’t governance the better choice?
Why “Governance?”
I’m often asked if I can find a more user-friendly word than “governance.”
No, I can’t.
For many, the word “governance” conjures up an image of an organizational strait jacket. Governance to them means forcing people to work in a small box or making everyone work the same way. They’d rather have me use words like “team building” or “collaboration model.” I usually refuse. Governance is good. And, after reading Managing Chaos and applying its guidance to your own organization, I hope you’ll agree. Governing doesn’t have to make business processes bureaucratic and ineffective. In fact, I’d argue that “bureaucratic and ineffective” describe how digital development works in your organizations right now—with no governance.
Governance is an enabler. It allows organizations to minimize some of the churn and uncertainty in development by clearly establishing accountability and decision-making authority for all matters digital. That doesn’t mean that the people who aren’t decision makers can’t provide input or offer new and innovative ideas. Rather, it means that at the end of the day, after all the information is considered, the organization clearly understands how decisions will be made about the digital portfolio.
There are many different ways to govern an organization’s digital presence effectively. Your job is to discover the way that works best for your digital team. Your digital governance framework should enable a dynamic that allows your organization to get its digital business done effectively—whether you’re a bleeding-edge online powerhouse or a global B-to-B with a bunch of slim “business card” websites. A good digital governance framework will establish a sort of digital development DNA that ensures that your digital presence evolves in a manner that is in harmony with your organization’s strategic objectives. A digital governance framework isn’t bureaucratic and ineffective. Properly designed, a digital governance framework can make your online business machine sing.
The proof is out there. Wikipedia is, arguably, one of the most substantively and collaboratively governed websites on the Web, but it is also perceived as a site that fosters a high degree of freedom of expression. The well-defined open standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) enable the World Wide Web to exist, as it is—without which we would not even be having this conversation. And the multiplicity of purpose and diversity apparent on the World Wide Web speaks for itself.
Your organization needs its own internal W3C, so to speak, so that departments, schools, lines of business—however you segment your organization—can be free to take advantage of digital channels, but within parameters that make sense for the organization’s mission, goals, and bottom line. In addition, it needs to intentionally design its digital team so that it can work efficiently and productively. And that’s the work of a digital governance framework.
This is your chance to establish the foundational framework that will influence the direction of digital in your organization for years to come. Business leaders and senior digital leaders need to get together and establish how to govern and manage digital effectively in their organizations. Now. Through Managing Chaos, you will learn how to free your organization 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