FIGURE 2.1 The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Time for Three perform at Carnegie Hall’s Spring for Music festival.
But, if you look at the interactions and artifacts required for a typical hour’s worth of quality jazz versus an hour’s worth of quality orchestral music, you’ll see a big difference. Jazz musicians might have a few lead sheets, which detail the melody of a tune and its basic harmonic framework, whereas the orchestral conductor is faced with a relatively thick score, usually marked up with further notes and cues. Jazz musicians might have a 10-minute conversation before they start their gig, but a symphony orchestra may spend an afternoon or more starting and stopping a piece, paying close attention to the tricky parts where the group might stumble over each other. And, even before the orchestra musicians get together to rehearse, various orchestral sections may get together to work through concerns related to their section, like bowing strategies for string players. It’s not an accident that all the bows in a violin section all move together!
In the end, both the jazz trio and the orchestra can deliver a powerful performance that satisfies the audience. And both groups rely on the competence and expertise of individual musicians. The difference lies in the fact that one group makes it up as they go along and sees where it takes them, while the other one doesn’t. It’s a different means to an end and that means is dictated by one thing primarily—the size of the group involved. It’s easier to get three or four people to collaborate and invent in real time than it is to get 100 people to do so.
It’s likely that your organization’s early Web team was like a jazz trio—that is, a group of highly engaged people with special skills working on one website and making things up as they went along. And it worked—for a while. Now, 15 or 20 years later, an organization might have 10, 100, or 500 people and an array of external support vendors putting in effort to support their digital presence. And, instead of websites being an interesting business oddity, they have become mission critical. Only the problem is that no one has taken the time to mature and intentionally form the digital team that supports those sites—to identify who all those resources are, where they are in the organization, what they are supposed to be doing, and how the whole team should work together as a unit. Just as there are a lot of different ensemble configurations between the small intimacy of the jazz ensemble and the top-down, highly structured orchestra, there are many different types of digital team configurations. Your job is to discover which configuration will work best for your organization so that you have an appropriate canvas upon which to execute your digital governance design work
The real work of a digital governance framework is to assign appropriate authority for digital strategy, policy, and standards decision-making to the right resources within your digital team. But, if you have no sense of where your team members are or what they do, it is almost impossible to assign digital governance authority properly. Let’s take a look at your digital team
What Is Your Digital Team?
Your digital team is the full set of resources required to keep the digital process functioning for your organization. Your digital team includes not just the core product-focused teams found in marketing/communications and IT, but also the casual content contributors, business unit Web managers, supporting software vendors, and organizational agencies of record. Your digital team also includes those who administer and support digital efforts by tending to the programmatic aspects of the digital team, such as budget digital team resource development and management.
DO’S AND DON’TS
DON’T: Worry too much about whether your core digital team is in marketing, communications, or IT (or anywhere else in your organization). Clearly defined roles and authority are much more important than the organizational placement of your core team.
Unfortunately, many organizations identify their digital teams as only the hands-on resources that design, write, and post Web content and create applications on a daily basis. This narrow view of the digital team reinforces the idea that digital is a tactical function and not a strategic one that requires planning and resource management. It also minimizes the deep information and technical architectural issues that must be addressed in order to do digital well and safely for your organization and your users. With a broader perspective of your digital team, it becomes clear that your team is all over your organization, and there comes the realization that there is a diversity of skills required to support digital. Some of those skills existed in your organization prior to digital, and some of the skills are new. Some skills are specifically related to digital expertise, and some of them are related to other domains.
An easy way to get a handle on your digital team is to consider the following (see Figure 2.2):
• The location, role, and budgeting source of your core digital team.
• The location, roles, and budgeting source for your distributed digital team, which can include departmental Web managers, country Web managers, product-focused content contributors, and other satellite teams.
• The authority, role, and budgeting source of any digital steering committees, councils, and working groups.
• The identity of and budgeting source for your extended digital team, which includes agencies of record, software integrators, and other external vendor support.
FIGURE 2.2 Components of your digital team.
Once these aspects are clearly understood, you will have established a clear resource field upon which to place decision-making authority. Now, let’s look at each aspect of your team in more depth.
NOTE LIKE MAKES LIKE
Well-organized, effective digital teams usually produce a well-organized and effective digital presence. Conversely, a poorly organized, inefficient digital team usually produces a poorly organized and ineffective digital presence. The main product of digital team disorganization is redundancy of effort, which can lead to things like a bad user experience through conflicting interface and application design standards, or fiscal waste through the implementation of duplicitous back-end systems.
Your Core Team
The core digital team’s job is to conceptualize, architect, and oversee the full organizational digital presence. In most organizations, the core digital team is the set of resources you most likely called the “Web team.” In an environment where digital governance is immature, this team often has de facto authority over digital standards—that is, until a powerful stakeholder disagrees with them. Often, they are in either marketing/communications or your IT department. But technically speaking, the team can be anywhere in the organization. The core team has many responsibilities that can be distilled into two functions: program management and product management.
DO’S AND DON’TS
DON’T: Try to run your 100-person digital operation as a loose collaboration. Make sure that roles and responsibilities are well defined and that you have bridging functions cutting across working silos.
Core Team Program Management
NOTE PROGRAM MANAGEMENT RESPONSIBILITIES
• Oversees local and global digital staff and budget.
• Implements digital strategy.
• Measures