Designing Better Strategists

From webmaster to content editor, web manager to digital director, it seems every few years my titles overseeing digital operations for organizations would change with the prevailing winds.

The reason for this has more to do with the rapid complexity of which things change. When you go from having just a website, to having lots of websites, apps & social media properties it would make sense that you’d need to reflect on how those changes impact the positions people hold in legacy organizations.

We need to stop isolating digital as though it’s something separate from operations.

Why we have digital strategists

We need an all-encompassing role for generalists who monitor, manage and overseas the progress of institutional properties. I’m mostly approaching this from the perspective of colleges and universities (because it’s where I’ve done most of my work) but the lessons apply to other non-profits and large organizations, because there are countless ads per week attempting to fill these master-generalist positions that can wear multiple hats.

Some of the core capabilities include:

• Knowledge of HTML/CSS.
• An ability to manage a content management system.
• Project management experience.
• An ability to stay on top of trends.
• A person who can coordinate content & people across functional divisions within a large organization.
• A good communicator.

Most organizations think they need a digital strategist because they’ve housed their website in marketing. It’s a communications tool, right? So they need someone to bridge the gap between the marketing lead, technical leads who has control of the IT infrastructure and in some cases, serve as a bridge between the executive/C-Suite as a trusted resource on digital tactics.

I know because it’s a role I’ve inhabited for years as both a staff member and a consultant. However, isolating the digital work negates the interconnected nature of digital strategy across an organization. For years, I used to think all most organizations needed was more investment in the digital area.

Integrating digital into the organizational DNA

As funny as it might sound now, major manufacturing companies at the turn of the 20th century once employed ‘Chief Electricity Officers’ to ensure they were plugged into a stable electrical source. We’re already at a point where talking about “digital” is as anachronistic as talking about “water supply” or “HVAC”

“As electricity became a utility, a shared resource essential to business operations but inconsequential to competitive differentiation, it no longer required a separate staff to watch over it. It became a routine and largely invisible element of operations, marketing, product development, purchasing, and other traditional functions. Chief electricity officers disappeared, their work complete.” — 
Nicholas Carr,
What’s a CIO to do?

The days of being able to bury your head in the sand about the complexities of digital are long gone. Being able to get by with a skeleton crew of digital staff, coupled with consultants to augment what you’re not able to learn isn’t enough to get ahead. There’s the increased threat of some marketers that digital is going to render their roles less relevant. Sprinkle in the ways that digital can be used as a mechanism to increase budgets for other marketing spending without investing on actual web-related priorities and you can be finished before you start.

The assumptions are key to the problems. In most scenarios, a person applies for a job and walks into an organization understanding the intersection of where design, strategy & business goals meet.

You’re prepared to tackle organizational challenges, educate where necessary and become an evangelize for the digital cause through the organization. The problem with most digital strategy roles is we’re relying on the institution to tell us what’s wrong. When this is much like a doctor asking a sick person to use the internet to diagnose their own symptoms. Dan Hill, formerly with the Helsinki Design Lab calls this “the architecture of the problem.”

There are serious issues with understanding how to manage the full user-experience to include digital. Most technical concerns are being managed by non-technical people within their silos and at the moment, Technology/IT issues are solved as more of a “problem solving” entity than from a strategic view.

This leaves lots of people who are outside of the depth of their experience making key decisions and leaving the rest of the decisions to outside consultants who lack a real understanding of the complexities of the environment that having a system entail.

Some of the challenges include:

• Keen awareness of how digital was influencing decisions of audiences, but no commitment for stakeholder-level leadership to fund the changes needed to build a unit that was more digitally responsive.
• Lack of personnel in-house to carry out the tasks necessary.
• Due to lack of senior-level leadership to make definitive decisions about digital strategy, stakeholders across the board can make sweeping recommendations and policy decisions about the direction of digital properties without checks or balances to ensure these decisions were based in reality.
• IT support is more reactive rather than proactive.

Most traditional marketing and strategy books do not have the capabilities necessary to complete a digital world. By the time you read a book about strategy or the workplace examples are outdated.

Too often the case studies that they use our case studies that affect major corporations with billion dollar budget. While these ideas can be instructive to some degree, the reality is that institutions or organizations at a much smaller level don’t have the capabilities to adopt these types of examples.

Asking for a splash of color, taking new photos and measuring the results are all part of the big picture but it’s not the only thing that matters. We’ve been seduced by the idea that the only way to reach our targets are using sophisticated ways to trick people into having an emotional connection with us through a bevy of expensive methods from direct mail, giant envelopes, social media conversations on disparate networks, sporting events & the aforementioned shiny responsive website.

Most organizations aren’t built for transformation, but rather, a massive reshuffling of a deck with the same cards doled out in a different order with perhaps a different set of rules.

So where does that leave us? In the context of universities, there are complex issues that are unique to those entities and not other organizations.

“We have 6,000 employees at the University of Louisville. We operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year… We’re in the housing business, police business, health services business, food business, research business, entertainment business, sports business. And oh yeah, we’re in the education business, too.” — 
James Ramsey, President, University of Louisville (January 2016)

As Ramsey’s quote illustrates, when you’re essentially operating a small city-state, it can be difficult to know how to wrangle such disparate entities into some form of cohesion. We have tools like digital governance to help, but most of these frameworks don’t recognize the true lack of awareness most within organizations have about the need for these solutions, even if you pay someone lots of money to uncover these truths.

It’s akin to hiring a fancy chef to just make you comfort foods every night, because it’s what you’re comfortable with.

Going back to the electricity example, digital is an integral part of the modern organization. Yet we still view it with a skeptic’s gaze. Siloing digital teams away from the main nerve center of the business leadership creates significant blind spots that won’t get solved by redesigning anything other than the way teams are structured across the organization.

When I give workshops, I’ve been fond of asking digital leaders across the country a simple question. “If I showed up in your organization right now and asked any random person how I get content from where they sit to the website, what percentage of the people would be able to tell me?”

Almost universally, people meet me with blank stares. We’ve been accustomed to thinking of the website as a protected property that needs to be secured. Digital people have adopted the IT posture of mystifying quasi-technical professions as mystery because it allows you to demand bigger budgets, command larger salaries and leverages the work as more important.

The perils of this antiquated legacy are costing our organizations in lost hours, ill-equipped staff and leadership who lack of the deep awareness of the asset the digital infrastructure can be to improving the bottom line.