Kristina Podnar

A long, long time ago, in a land far away, a corporate digital marketing team created a brand new, shiny website. It had the most resonant of branding, ideal tone and voice, a content management system second to none, and a documented set of standards that made all other corporate digital marketing teams red with envy. The standards covered a broad range of topics on how to operate the digital asset, from colors and fonts,… Continue Reading Best Practices for (Nearly Perfect) Standards

Digital standards are specifications that guide us in what is to be done within a specific aspect of digital publication. Standards are an excellent way to support your digital policies and ensure that an aspect of your digital operations is always completed in the same way, with predictable and expected results. Depending on your longevity in the digital space, you have likely experienced both good and bad standards. Good standards are usually short, specific, written… Continue Reading Contents of a Good Digital Standard

Organizations are coming to the realization that legacy digital processes and operational models must be updated, not only to remain competitive in today’s market, but to continue to exist in the face of increasing digital and business disruptions. Digital transformation is difficult for many reasons, but data normalization and management are particularly challenging. However, managing your data well is a challenge worth taking on as it can help you underpin new products and services, streamline… Continue Reading Data Transformation Tips for the Digital Organization

A week doesn’t go by that I am not asked which automated tool can ensure online quality and what should organizations be looking for when assessing a standards tool. While there are ample toolsets in the marketplace, with varying features and associated price points, the reality is that tools can only support standards adoption and cannot drive their implementation. Quality tools are not inherently bad or a poor investment, but you need to understand their… Continue Reading An Automated Tool Can’t Ensure Standards

In school, there are always three types of students: those who regularly study and are ready for the exam those who cram the night before in order to just pass the exam those who wing it and hope for the best. The world of digital policy and regulatory compliance is not all that different. The world of digital policy and regulatory compliance is not all that different. Recently the chatter around General Data Protection Regulation… Continue Reading Cramming for GDPR or Is It Simply a Review?

IT departments have long relied on standard operating procedures (SOPs) for server security lock downs and other infrastructure-related activities. Help desks use them routinely to quickly address user issues. So why would you not develop standard operating procedures for digital operations? Certainly not every policy or standard requires a supporting operating procedure, but consider a scenario where you are trying to troubleshoot an issue with your webpage header not properly displaying, but rather looking small… Continue Reading Supporting Digital Operations with Standard Operating Procedures

As a digital governance consultant focusing on policies, I interact regularly with digital marketing professionals and corporate counsels who appreciate the risk of data breach and recognize that someone within the organization should be thinking about privacy protection. Often there is a privacy officer involved in the discussion, but not always. Large multinationals tend to disseminate that accountability across the globe and smaller organizations don’t have enough work to hire a privacy specialist, so it… Continue Reading The Customer Contract: Addressing Personally Identifiable Information In Your Organization

If your company has not received an audit request from a software vendor asking you to validate what aspects of their tools or service you are using in order to assess licensing fees, it is only a matter of time. While many vendors have implemented half-successful automated processes to measure usage and licensing of their software, this area of digital is still quite immature. As a result, vendors may request data, access to your systems,… Continue Reading Governing Software and Navigating Audits

Deciding exactly how many standards authors you should have, and how many is too many, is exactly what we tease out during digital governance framework definition efforts. It can be challenging to determine the exact number of subject matter experts (SMEs) to invite into the standards-writing fold: Choose too few and you will likely struggle with the lack of definition and depth to your standards. Choose too many and your standards may never get written… Continue Reading How Many Standards Authors Does It Take to Establish a Standard?