The Decision to Govern Digital Spaces
There’s a broad field to take into account when considering the governance of online experiences. There is the Internet, the World Wide…
There’s a broad field to take into account when considering the governance of online experiences. There is the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the digital experiences businesses create. It’s challenging to sort it all out. There’s the work Sir Tim Berners-Lee is leading at the World Wide Web Foundation. And there are organizations like the Internet Society (ISOC), an organization many digital makers never really considered until last year when ISOC sought to sell their .org domain management function to a private equity firm. There are also NGOs, like the UN, expressing opinions about human rights associated with these new technologies.
How the Internet, Web, and Digital Governance Interact
The Web Foundation, ISOC, and UN are examples of organizations that are focused on the governance of the World Wide Web and the Internet. Because of the nature of these two technologies and their (still) relative newness, the lines can be blurry when it comes to determining who has the authority to make rules about the deployment and use of these impactful technologies.
My professional focus, digital governance, centers on how organizations that make use of the Web and Internet technologies govern that use. Digital governance doesn’t exist in a silo. The choices organizations make about how to govern their digital footprint will be impacted by what’s going on with Web and Internet governance. As of yet, governance in these two arenas is immature. So we all have to be vigilant. We have to be careful and intentional about what we put online because, in ungoverned environments, it’s easy to do things that cause harm―either intentionally or unintentionally.
Not many people know what digital governance is. They confuse governance with strategy or workflow or content strategy or user experience. Digital governance is more detached than that. I often say to clients: governance doesn’t concern itself about the substance of a user experience, content, or technology strategy (saying this doesn’t win friends.) Instead, digital governance concerns itself with establishing a framework that helps you make rules for your organization―the kind of rules that create an environment where digital makers can implement good experiences. And the kind of rules that ensure an organization is not participating in un-business worthy activities online. What is un-business worthy is tied heavily to law and culture. That means it will shift as you move through different organizations, vertical markets, and geographies. Navigating this terrain is also the profound challenge of Internet and Web governance.
It’s an interesting dynamic. The Internet and Web are distinct as technologies but are substantively made up of all the websites, apps, social interactions, information, and commerce of organizations. So while there are distinct Internet and Web governance challenges to be addressed, improving digital governance will go a long way toward improving the overall quality and safety of the Web.
It’s essential to understand this context, but for the moment, let’s set aside this critical and broader conversation about Internet and Web governance. Companies should participate, inform, and influence those conversations, but they, in my view, aren’t going to be the decision-makers when it comes to the policies and standards that are put into place to make the Web a safe place. As much as some digital makers don’t like to hear it, those decisions are going to be made mostly by governments and NGOs―eventually.
Govern Now
Making a positive decision to govern an organizational digital footprint is not contingent on the Internet and Web governance scene being fully mature. But many digital makers still push against putting sophisticated governing mechanisms in place. There are a lot of reasons for that resistance, but I want to focus on one: the fear that the digital expertise (and the people who have it) will be overwhelmed by grinding bureaucracy. It’s a confusion that asserts that any form of governance will dictate a convoluted, non-agile workflow with many slow review cycles that will stifle the creativity of digital designers and architects of all stripes.
One organization I worked with seriously thought that if they (the digital team) discussed possible compliance and regulatory concerns with their legal team, the team would make them take down their website―the whole thing, not a microsite. The whole giant global multi-national website. It was irrational. When we talked with their legal department and compliance (with permission), it turns out they had one minor concern that was easy to address and had no impact on the functionality of the experience but protected their customers. It was notable that the digital team would rather go live with an at-risk feature than talk to the folks in compliance who, according to them, “lived in the dark ages.” It was notable as well that there were no policies or standards in place that addressed the data privacy concern under question. Had those rules been in place, the experience would have been designed with certain constraints in mind, and the organization would have arrived at the same place but with a lot less stress and drama―and probably faster. Faster, not slower. And it’s worth saying, especially given what we see online with the questionable use of customer data, that maybe it would have been okay to make a choice not to deploy a feature that violated customer privacy.
Digital domain experts shouldn’t be scared that digital governance will disempower them. That’s not what governance does. A digital governance framework states truths like, “When our organization writes a content strategy, the marketing team writes it, and everyone else in the organization has to follow that strategy.” Done. Digital governance is non-partisan. Governance doesn’t dictate the substance of a strategy. In the instance of content strategy, it assumes you’ve hired good content strategists, and they’ll do their job-and if you haven’t, that you’ll fix that operational/human resources problem. Governance asserts things like, “The legal department is responsible for making sure we know the right set of digital policies to write and making sure that they are written by knowledgeable people, updated as required, and communicated to the right people.” Governing frameworks don’t impose on domain expertise. They clear the field so those experts can conceive of strategies and execute them with integrity and without unproductive debates about who has the authority to do so.
A lack of governance is the root of many avoidable online catastrophes. When a profitable and successful global company asserts that they are taken by surprise by a data breach or didn’t know that aspects of their organization were mishandling data, I have to pause. Why? Why didn’t you know? Sometimes it is new terrain, and I’ll give them a pass.
But often it’s because they didn’t stop to think about it. Blinkered by business traction, they didn’t ask fundamental questions. When you work to mature digital governance, those fundamentals rise to the surface. When you have to clearly define what the scope of digital is in your organization, and when you ask who is accountable for strategy, policy, and standards definition for that scope, you are forced to have meaningful conversations with a diverse set of digital and business stakeholders. And through that dialogue, you discover where the gaps and vulnerable spots are in your digital portfolio. It’s an opportunity to tighten things up and protect your organization and your customers.
Governance will not fix everything. Bad things happen. And when viewed through a historical lens of technology maturity, the commercial Internet, Web, and digital are still in the early days, and businesses will continue to be caught by surprise by what is to come. But, informed by 25 years of experience and given what we do know about what can go wrong online, a lack of proactive attention to digital governance is not about being taken by surprise; it’s about negligence.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.