Managing Chaos

The design phase has six aspects: information gathering and preparation; defining the digital team; identifying digital strategy, accountability, and authority; identifying digital policy stewardship and authorship; determining digital standards stewardship; and conducting standards inputs and decisions exercises.

Understand Your Digital Landscape
Sometimes, organizations are in such disarray digitally that they really don’t understand the fundamental landscape of their digital presence. Before you get started assigning accountability and authority, you’ll need to pursue a level of information gathering and analysis. For in

We recommended that accountability (see Table 11.1) for ensuring that a digital strategy was implemented at the university and resided with the university executive leadership (see Figure 11.3).

Tactics for executing on digital strategy included:

• Establish a Digital University Consortium as a forum for strategic collaboration.

• Create a digital governance framework to clarify university digital roles and responsibilities.

• Draft and approve a digital plan.

• Establish digital guiding principles.

• Clarify the digital budget.

• Define metrics for measuring digital effectiveness.

Tactics for executing on digital strategy included:

• Establish a Digital University Consortium as a forum for strategic collaboration.

• Create a digital governance framework to clarify university digital roles and responsibilities.

• Draft and approve a digital plan.

• Establish digital guiding principles.

• Clarify the digital budget.

• Define metrics for measuring digital effectiveness.

the Community of Practice would serve as an open forum in which to showcase aspects of the digital campus under development. The purpose of this community would be to share information about university Web initiatives and emerging best practices. It would also provide a forum for training related to standards and industry best practices in Web management, and it would serve as a venue for innovators to showcase new digital work being done at the university.

Examine and discuss the TBD list of digital projects to be implemented by the Web team. Remove unnecessary items and find opportunities for consolidation.

online and left there—for years—with no plan for maintenance or retirement of content.

The amount of redundant, outdated, and trivial content (ROT) on the website was high, since no one had taken the opportunity to consider

resources. That request could be for technology, head count, or for the executives to provide digital workers with the strategic guidance they need to truly take digital governance and operations in the organization to maturity

Also, alignment at the grassroots level is an effective way to demonstrate to senior leadership the power behind the unified approach to digital. While more junior resources in the organizations may not be able to give themselves the authority to move or increase the digital budget and head count in an organization, they can certainly begin to come to consensus around digital quality guidelines and present a unified front to management. There is nothing more powerful than a well-organized, good functioning