Web Governance & its discontents
I talk a lot about digital governance, that is, the practice of establishing clear accountability for digital strategy, policy and standards. You create frameworks to help organizations streamline digital content creation with the idea that delineating the lines of ownership make it easier to determine who is responsible for managing aspects of an organization’s digital channels.
Here’s the problem with the existing framework of digital governance: It presupposes a kind of harmony between different departments, functional areas, and silos. Even within organizations where there are no turf wars, it is remarkably quaint to assume that one set of standards can somehow quell the rancor that comes from ultimately deciding who gets to do the work of web content.
Having worked mostly with universities and colleges on website migrations, redesigns, CMS implementations and associated tasks, there are a lot of politics associated with trying to assert control over particular aspects of digital content.
Let’s stop calling it ‘digital governance’
The term doesn’t really mean what it says.
When we talk about digital governance, we’re really talking about a holistic understanding along the intersection of business goals and content across the organization. The problem is, all of that is encompassed in enterprise web product strategy.
So what about the content and the management of it?
Last year, I wrote in the article Death to the CMS which talked about the challenges of managing web content:
People are not usually inclined to sign up for more work.
Rather than view managing web content as an opportunity, end users have come to see it as a burden.
This left the onus on managing this content on web editors who generally do not have uniform job titles, responsibilities and who largely owe their continued existence to the confluence of internal politics &
the fact that a bevy of people had little desire (or time) to learn what they were doing with the website.
It’s not an accident that most governance consultants only give examples of large organizations where these tactics and strategies work. The reason? Most places are too informal for such rigid structure to show up on the radar, much less have the willingness to pay someone to help them solve a problem they don’t identify.
There are better ways to tackle the issues and challenges that surround the foundational principles of governance based on the bedrock of these common assumptions around the area.
1. Defining the scope
Whenever a new paradigm is created, there seems to be an encroachment on people who are already doing the work. In this example, governance is really a functional responsibility of a web group. Other people are often involved in the process, conversations and decision-making. But without defining the scope of the responsibilities, we’re not operating on a level playing field.
2. There is no governance standard
The idea that you can create a standard governance across complex organizations operates under the impression these organizations are shaped similarly. Even two companies with the same org chart structure might have an entirely different nomenclature for the same things, different approval procedures and most important, personnel.
3. Governance requires executive buy-in
Junior employees cannot implement a governance paradigm. In most cases, it will almost always take senior leadership buy-in to create conditions necessary to examine and establish levels of governance oversight. The problem? There are far too many things for executives to do that are deemed more important and rare organizations have a champion at the executive level for web/digital product in the trenches of everyday work.
Preaching the gospel of oversight doesn’t do a whole lot of good when most places know there are problems, but nobody has the permissions, relationships, or time to begin to solve them.
The simple way to explain it
The term digital governance sounds like something related to government, not management and organization of digital content for an organization’s online properties.
The reality is, digital governance is figuring out who is responsible for the development, editing, and deployment of content within an organization’s online properties.
Most conversations around governance assume people have a baseline understanding of the key principles of content strategy, design, technical strategy, and implementation. There’s usually some level of acceptance that these methods are necessary to produce a productive web presence that meets the goals the company has set forth.
It doesn’t take more than a few searches of websites for things like government or non-chain retail establishments and looking at their user experiences to realize that not everyone has embraced this trend. I think most web workers want to do good work, but in large organizations a lack of clear ownership stymies what talent exists to execute.
Because if we’re honest, it’s not the practitioners who are writing the HTML, PHP, Javascript or CSS and have vibrant careers servicing their local areas website development needs who need the convincing. Governance is an enterprise conversation, not one for Main Street.
And when the conversation doesn’t happen at an enterprise-level the directors and managers aren’t given the authority to own their respective tasks, and the junior employees are often left directionless, or worse. When no authority is given, managers often make up their own rules and goals in an attempt to rally their troops.
Why can’t the CMS handle it?
Today’s unfortunate reality is that most organizations are not going to invest valuable resources into making sense of who owns content across their silos. This is easy when one person is charged with doing all of it. But many large, highly-matrixed organizations have not given much of a second thought to the who, how, and why of managing their content because it’s too complex to wrap their minds around when low-hanging fruit seems to abound.
Hiring someone to handle this full-time seems decadent in these austere times and most places probably don’t realize it’s something an actual human can manage. Instead, they look to software like content management systems to solve the issues of user permissions, content auditing, editing & publishing. Often people within the organization wear multiple hats attempting to tackle these roles while also managing the aspects of other responsibilities.
Content cartography
Governance is about oversight. Most people managing governance don’t have the kind of oversight necessary to enact the sorts of sweeping changes that large-scale governance requires. Moreover, most organizations aren’t big enough to really justify a consultant to tell them how to better organize their systems.
Cartography is simply the science of making maps. When we distill governance, it’s about understanding a visual map of who has the responsibility for what aspects of content, who approves it and how it gets published through our systems. The cartographer in this example doesn’t necessarily approve everyone’s content. In some cases, they’re not even the one publishing it at all.
Within an organization, there are likely people who have a sense of the roadmap of content ownership. We can distribute responsibilities for managing content, but actually visualizing who owns what is a role that one person should inhabit.
Towards a brighter future
What’s needed are more leaders who recognize the need for investing in their content. It doesn’t always require a full-time person devoted only to that work. But it does involve a committed effort at the upper tier to empower everyday workers to own their jobs. Some times this requires bringing in outside help to figure it out.
In the end, the simple truth is that governance isn’t a one person role, it takes a team. But without buy-in from the top, no amount of redesigns will change the way our content looks. It requires thinking deliberately about who is publishing on our sites, the hows, and whys. Taking the time to invest in governance can save your team lots of time and money in the subsequent days, months, and years regardless of where you are in the process of rethinking your website.