For organisations to succeed in the digital age, they need to adopt new frameworks and ways of working. The key to doing this is to dust off and turn inside-out existing governance frameworks, reinvigorating them with more nimble ways of working. Governance is no longer a separate policy or individual decision maker. It is everyone working in digital. It is every digital touch point and policy. It is the digital strategy, the customer strategy, the media strategy, the KPI framework, analytics, and SEO.
Twenty-first century governance is the supportive mesh of digital success.
Presented 01 Oct 2014 at Confab Europe Barcelona
http://confabevents.com/events/europe/program/10-steps-to-salvation-creating-digital-governance-that-works
5. Without it you’re lost.
Enterprise web governance
ensures the proper stewardship
of an organizational
web presence.
Lisa Welchman
6. Old style governance
• Fixed world of wires
e.g. big mainframes,
expensive technology
suites
• Online was owned by
the IT department
• Early online publishing
not dissimilar to print
• Transferring old
governance
frameworks made
sense
13. Alas, failures of governance abound.
Some tell tale signs of inattention to governance:
• Not everyone is on board the digital train
• Poor documentation and format
• No clear process for sign-off or approval
• No shared understanding of managing non-standard
requests
14. With an impact on people building digital
Crazy workflows!
1. Request to web team
2. To and fro with client
3. Upload to CMS
4. Screenshots of CMS preview
5. Copy into PPT
6. Add narrative showing interaction
7. Regs & Compliance review
8. Two-week turnaround
9. Back to web team
10. Upload to live
16. Why is this happening?
No-one wants content to be wrong.
Or sets out to work crazy hours via a
dumb workflow.
So what’s the problem?
17. It’s because the frameworks in place don’t work.
They’re:
– outmoded
– focused on print
– not agile
– typically convoluted
18. Governance needs a facelift
• Focus is analogue, not digital
• Websites are is now the shop front: don’t make it hard for
people to see in
• This is all new; businesses didn’t have to do this 10, 15
years ago
• They now have to do their job AND do digital
19. How do we need to think differently about
governance?
• It’s not what it used to be
• Governance isn’t a document, a committee, a gatekeeper
– It’s a new way of working
• Twenty-first century
governance is the supportive
mesh of digital success
20. What does digital governance mean to content?
• It means content and context is
mapped, prioritized and
understood
• Teamwork!
• Content is
– On-brand, correct
– Compliant
– Accurate
– Measurable and working hard
22. Digital governance: scope
Technology and operations
CMS set up, database
configuration, infrastructure
Joiners, leavers, movers
Local ownership and
control, training, access
management
Workflow
Support requests, change
requests, automated
approval
Content
Content governance: the
heart of any governance
framework
• Text
Sourcing, writing, translating,
adding, editing, removing
• Images
Picking images – library or
photo shoot? Formats, sizes
• Metadata & tagging
Technical details count!
• Tone of voice
It’s not just what you say, it’s
how you say it
• Visual style
Stay on-brand: ensure the site
perfects personalised
experiences
• Content management
Keeping people and systems
in sync
• Analytics
Your compass of truth
23. Governance framework
Global Steering Guidelines Planning Tools Optimization
Global steering
committee
Global KPI
framework
Agency (and inter-agency)
management
Global guidelines
Local guidelines
Global / local
content calendars
Tactical planning
Content
updates
Digital asset
manage-ment
Evaluation
Optimization
Content
distribution
Processes / people Software / tools Documents / policies
Analytics
24. Example of a digital-content workflow
Set-up Planning
Sourcing
Formatting Editing Creation.
Reviewing and
publishing
Monitoring Removal
25. And digital content deliverables
Content
plan
Content KPI
framework
Approval
principles
Content
briefs
Editorial
guidelines
Content
templates
27. 1. Strategy
• Start by defining a plan and a common vision for the
organisation
• Align digital with strategic business goals
– User centred strategy
– User centred content
• Have an entrepreneurial information leader
28. 2. People: you’re lost without leadership
• Your executive must be on board
– If the head honchos don’t get digital and live and breathe the
vision, you’re wasting your energy – nothing will ever happen
– Your CMO and CTO must get on
• CMOs will spend more on tech by 2017 than CIOs do now
• If you’re in a leadership role, employ the right people:
trust them to do their job
29. 3. Tech
• Hardware, servers, software, systems are tools
• Tech doesn't have to be big
• Start small, prove your principles, grow
30. Follow the leaders
Start small, prove your principles, grow
Like the Hearst corporation
• Hearst magazines uses WordPress to power
their (corporate) website
31. 4. Spring clean!
• By now you know
– what you’re trying to achieve (strategy)
– who’s leading on it (people)
– the tools you’ll need (tech)
• Now it’s time to get rid of the dead wood
– Small teams
– Smart work practices
– Begin as you intend to continue: it’s happening – it’s no
longer a project; it is/will be, your reality
32. 5. Content
• Not all content is the same
– Learn to spot the difference
– Use insight to learn what’s important to your users
• A content strategy frames all activity; no (strategic) ticket,
no start
– You need a content vision, to prevent a whole world of
wrongness
34. Who are all losing market share to
digital disruptors
35. 6. Workflows
• Workflows map dependencies and lays circuits that link
relationships
– Remove friction
• Design them to be inclusive, nimble, empowered,
empathetic, smart
• Build with muscle and power so you can pull the plug
before it’s too late
36. Great work flows = productivity!
Lessons from the public sector:
• Transparency helps accountability
• More at stake than the bottom line
• Long term vision
– efficiencies of investment in research, policy over decades
• Shared cultural understandings
37. Reflowing the workflow
Crazy Perfectly sensible workflow
1. Request to web team
2. To and fro with client
3. Upload to CMS test server
4. Send link to test site to Regs & Compliance for review
5. One-week two week turnaround
6. Back to web team
7. Upload to live
38. Reflowing the workflow
Crazy Perfectly sensible workflow
1. Request to web team
2. To and fro with client
3. Upload to CMS test server
4. Send link to test site to Regs & Compliance for review
5. One-week two week turnaround
6. Back to web team
7. Upload to live
39. 7. Corridor chats
• Let’s get social: colleagues and higher ups
• Create a framework everyone understands
• Engineer corridor chats with decision makers to keep the
wheels oiled
• Harness all resources you can: sell digital!
40. 8. Your audience
• It’s time to check in with the people paying your salary:
customers, students, clients:
• Is your governance framework working for them?
• When they need to do something with you, to find that phone
number to keep their lights on, are you helping them?
• Is governance supporting the strategy, which is supporting
users/customers
41. 9. No rest for the wicked
• Not resting on your laurels:
– Test always with data against smart benchmarks
– How effective is digital?
– How much have you spent?
– Are people reading/doing/acting on your products?
– Are you joined up.
– What needs to change?
– What’s working, what’s not?
• Everything today is measurable: make this a fundamental
part of your framework
42. 10. Yoga time
• Be agile, nimble, flexible
• You’re not locked into anything
• You need to be future prepared
– Future proofing, but without the expectation of
perfection; you don’t know what’s coming, so set
things up to be ready to move
43. 10 steps
3. Tech
2. People
1. Strategy
10. Yoga
9. Data
7. Corridor chats
6. Work flows
5. Content
8. Audience
4. Spring clean
45. Takeaways
1. Content - the heart
and lungs of digital;
governance - the
muscles/ligaments and
central nervous system
2. Content strategists
must own governance
and lead the
conversation
46. Takeaways
3. Governance applies
across the content
lifecycle; it’s not a
checkpoint before launch
4. Embrace the new
way of working in digital
– give governance a
hug
48. Acknowledgements!
A big thank you to Alex Papageorgiou for her hand-drawn
graphics. (She saved you from death by PowerPoint and my
slides from looking very boring indeed.)
And for ongoing inspiration, to members of the DigitasLBi
content strategy team, past and present.
Editor's Notes
Content is at the heart of digital. And all of a sudden, the relationships that map content’s relationship and context become more important than ever.
Without governance, content and digital falls apart.
Failures of governance abound. Here are just a few indicators that governance has been neglected.
Not everyone is on board. This is from the leadership and executive down through management and to staff. For example, in my job, an all too common scenario is that a company has asked DigitasLBi to help them transform their business so it’s digitally viable. Typically, this request comes from the executive who have bought into the idea and recognise the need for digital transformation. But they forgot to sell their plans internally. Or make structural changes necessary to help transformation. So when I come in and deal with clients who are a few rungs down in the organisation, they’re not prepared, equipped or empowered to work properly with us
Poor documentation: confusing requests in systems or documents that are hard work to use. Constraints of format that create duplicate content
Sign-off procedures and workflows that have not been adapted or modified to keep up with realities of digital publishing.
And panicked emergency publishing instead of something that’s expected, resourced and planned for.
Not to mention you have no way to way to keep track of investment or have confidence that digital is on track.
How does this then play out? Not happily. Failures of governance are no fun for anyone.
For example, for people working in digital.
One client I was working with had a convoluted approval system for updates to the website because of an inflexible regs and compliance department. This meant that every time the web team updated a product page, before they could publish, they copied the CMS preview of newly-built pages to PowerPoint, wrote a narrative showing how people interacted with the new content, and sent to the Compliance Team for sign-off. Who had a two-week turnaround on approvals.
This was at a large multinational company operating, as all do, to some level or another, within a regulatory framework. So requests from the web team were frequent. And the web team was subsequently unnecessarily overworked and stressed.
If people building the site are stressed, let’s pause and think about the hapless reader looking for help/advice/information/something to buy.
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/worst-websites-of-2012.html
http://www.futuro-house.net/page3.html
This is the story of an energy company providing emergency phone numbers for people who’s power had cut out in bad weather.
There was a handy link on the home page to a content page in Help and support with the numbers people needed.
This page was great for people: it had a clean design, was uncluttered, the information easy to read and the emergency numbers accurate. Marvellous. Cold shivering person was able to find the information they needed quickly, make the call with the last of their battery power.
Two weeks later, they lost power again. But this was isolated, not widespread so the energy company didn’t think enough people were affected to warrant a home page link. So person goes to home page, but with no link, there’s no easy way for them to find the page again. They recall it was in Help and support, so choose that. And sees Emergencies in the nav and finds a page here that they *think* is right. ….
Unfortunately, once the link dropped off the home page, there was no way people who needed this information could find it again. The page they could find, sensibly still sitting there in Help and Support, was cluttered and not entirely accurate. So findable, but not particularly readable.
These poor publishing practices also led to an overworked web team, who’d gone to the effort of creating a new page instead of updating the existing. But the biggest impact? The customer using the last of their mobile phone battery power to get the power back on who can’t find the help they need.
It’s not because governance isn’t considered.
Every organisation we work with has a governance framework
Because it’s the internet. The internet has sucked power out of the centre and given it to us. Great for customers – we now all walk around wrapped in digital blankets. Never away from our phones. Always checking in. Or checking out.
And now expect and demand businesses to keep up.
Business might have thought five, 10 years ago that they needed a website. So did that. But they now need to do much more.
But how joined up is it? And is your web content you? Is it what you want it to be? Does it reflect YOU?
We’ve seen in scenario 1 that there is a process; it’s just outmoded. It doesn’t reflect the new reality of digital publishing.
Because governance isn’t a document, a committee. It’s a new way of working.
It’s a framework that let’s people get on with their day-to-day reality, but with the assurance that time is well spent because it’s joined up.