Digital Standards
Standards articulate the exact nature of an organization’s digital portfolio. They exist to ensure optimal digital quality and effectiveness. Standards are both broad and deep. They address a broad range of topics with depth, such as overall user experience and content strategy concerns, as well as tactical specifications related to issues like a website’s component-based content model or replicable code snippets. That’s a lot of territory to cover. So, usually, it will take an equally broad and deep range of resources to contribute to and define digital standards.
Often, when I am brought in to resolve organizational governance concerns, the root of the problem is a disagreement about who gets to define those standards. Sometimes, the disagreement can be quite contentious with various righteous digital stakeholders coming to the debate armed with expertise (Web team), platform ownership (IT), and budget and mission (business units and departments)—all equally sure that they should be the final decision-maker.
A digital governance framework gives each of these stakeholder types an appropriate role to play in the definition of standards. In Chapter 5, “Stopping the Infighting About Digital Standards,” I’ll explore in detail how to assign stewardship and authorship to standards. When these roles are assigned, time-consuming debates about functionality will be minimized and an environment of collaboration for a better digital quality and effectiveness will emerge.
DO’S AND DON’TS
DO: Make sure that you document the full range of digital standards, which includes design, editorial, publishing and development, and network and server standards. Often, digital workers just focus on editorial and design standards and neglect the other categories.
The Power of the Framework
A digital governance framework is a system that delegates authority for digital decision-making about particular digital products and services from the organizational core to other aspects of the organization, as shown in Figure 1.5. Digital governance frameworks have less to do with who in your organization performs the hands-on work of digital and more to do with who has the authority to decide the nature of your websites, mobile apps, and social channels. That means a digital governance framework does not specify a production process. It does not articulate a content strategy, information architecture, or whether or not you work in an agile or waterfall development environment. What a digital governance framework does is specify who has the authority to make those decisions. This explicit separation of production processes from decision-making authority for standards is what gives the framework its power.
If you consider your own situation, it’s likely that most organizational debates about digital are not about who does the work, but rather about the way your websites look or what digital functionality should or should not be built and how those efforts are funded. In my experience, most digital stakeholders are so disinterested in doing the day-to-day grunt work of digital that a relatively small, central digital team is completely overburdened by tactical development tasks, while an army of digital stakeholders (who want to put little or no resources, fiscal or human, and effort into ensuring the work gets done) use their organizational authority to dictate how websites should look, which applications should be developed, and which social channels ought to be supported. This unbalanced situation leads to a contentious, resentful work environment, and more importantly, to a low-quality, ineffective digital product. The overburdened digital team stays in this situation because doing all the work is often the only way they can ensure that best practices and their standards are adhered to—because there is no governance framework, and the only way they can ensure standards compliance is by doing all the work themselves.
Having a digital governance framework brings digital development back into balance by separating day-to-day digital production functions and decision making for strategy, policy, and standards. For a long time, daily Web page maintenance and responsibility for the look-and-feel and functionality of websites has been concentrated in the hands of a few people in the organization. Perhaps this strategy was effective in the early days of digital production. But, today, with a more complex digital presence that includes not just websites but also mobile and social software interactions, digital production needs to be distributed throughout the organization. In order for production decentralization to be done effectively, a strategy and policies and standards need to be clearly communicated so that all people working with digital know what to do and what not to do. A digital governance framework provides that clarity.
FIGURE 1.5 The digital governance framework accountability grid.
When this effective decentralization of production happens, two important things occur:
• The workload and expense of digital developing is shared throughout the organization.
• The organization can leverage the knowledge assets of their entire organization to inform and support its digital portfolio.
And that’s really powerful.
DO’S AND DON’TS
DO: Understand where you are on the digital maturity curve before you start your framework design effort. Most organizations can’t make the leap from chaotic digital development environment to a responsive one in a single bound!
The Range of Digital Standards
When you establish decision-making authority for standards, you will discover that it takes collaboration among resources with a broad range of competencies in order to create an effective set of standards that work together (see Table 1.2).
TABLE 1.2 DIGITAL STANDARDS CATEGORIES
| Standards Domain | Influence Over |
| Design The graphical presentation layer of digital. |
Interactive (video design, podcasts, forms, applications)
Typography and Color (symbols, bullets, lists, fonts typeface and size, color palette)
Templates (page components, pop-up windows, tables, email)
Images
|