Digital Governance

Rest assured—every organization has digital governance problems. Just because an organization might look good online doesn’t mean that it is getting a good return on its investment or operating in an effective, low-risk environment. I’ve seen plenty of “lipstick-on-pig” digital environments where a nice-looking website design was only thinly veiling an ineffective digital presence supported by no real digital strategy… Continue Reading Your Digital Governance: How Bad Is It?

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… Continue Reading Cramming for GDPR or Is It Simply a Review?

Digital governance frameworks would be easy to design if they existed in a vacuum. But they don’t. There are many pre-existing organizational factors in every business that influence which aspects of an organization ought to be accountable and responsible for making decisions about what’s happening online. Sometimes the dynamics of these factors are so hard-wired into an organization’s operational processes… Continue Reading Five Digital Governance Design Factors

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… Continue Reading Supporting Digital Operations with Standard Operating Procedures

I like marketing teams. I work with them about 80% of the time when engaged in a digital governance project. That’s because very often it is the marketing team that is responsible for driving an organization’s online footprint (with some support from IT). Unlike some other parts of the business, marketers are good at messaging. They are good at talking… Continue Reading Digital Transformation: More than Marketing Well Online

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… Continue Reading The Customer Contract: Addressing Personally Identifiable Information In Your Organization

What Is Your Digital Team? Your digital team is the full set of resources required to keep the digital process functioning for your organization. Your digital team includes not just the the core product-focused teams found in marketing/communications and IT, but also the casual content contributors, business unit Web managers, supporting software vendors, and organizational agencies of record. Your digital… Continue Reading Identifying Your Digital Team

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… Continue Reading Governing Software and Navigating Audits

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… Continue Reading Choosing Your Digital Strategy “Dream Team”

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… Continue Reading How Many Standards Authors Does It Take to Establish a Standard?