Governance – immovable object, unstoppable force

May 23, 2024 by Ed Taylor

My role as Chief Growth Officer provides an excellent vantage point from which to observe trends happening within the DWG Member group and wider industry circles.

I would like to share some of these insights with you in our new ‘DWG Vantage Point’ series, where I will provide regular updates on what I am seeing, as well as highlighting some of the excellent work the DWG Consulting team has been carrying out.

I cannot quite believe we are already in May, and as we race through 2024, I wanted to reflect on the start of the year.

We have seen a large increase in the number of organizations seeking support around a topic I’m sure a lot of you know really well… it’s governance (hooray!).

This probably comes as no big surprise; it placed #5 in our survey of top priorities for DWG Members, which also included:

AI – Strategy, planning and execution.
Search/Findability – Integrating search across structured content and collaboration spaces.
Driving adoption – Across intranet, collaboration and social platforms.
Omnichannel communications – Improving and coordinating communications across multiple channels.
Governance – Establishing the necessary standards, processes and controls.

The thing with governance is that the need for having the right standards, controls and processes, along with resources that can continuously apply these, will never go away. As digital workplaces get ever more complex, this need will only get stronger, and the underlying issues within organizations that lack governance will continue to present themselves, maybe in potentially damaging ways – for example, AI services exposing confidential HR information.

The DWG Consulting team is currently working with eight global organizations to address their governance, with common reasons for seeking our support being:

Communications channels overload – end-users feel inundated and overwhelmed at the volume of content and information they receive.
Intranet services, launched during the pandemic, have started to creak. In some cases, no governance has been applied, so content has grown unchecked, rendering search useless, content hard to find and users frustrated.
Ownership of the ‘digital workplace’ has not been properly defined, lacks executive oversight and does not embrace cross-functional working.
There is no clear set of guidelines to help publishers know ‘which tool to use when’, so communications frequently don’t use the optimal channel for the desired audience/outcomes.
The technologies that underpin digital workplaces roll out changes and updates at a pace that organizations are not equipped to deal with. End-users exhibit poor levels of competency and are unable to maximize the services available to them.

To remedy these issues, we follow a standard methodology that focuses on three key outputs:

A governance model that defines the necessary standards, controls and processes to be applied, aka your rule book.
The creation of decision-making bodies to determine the direction of the service; this should be cross-functional, leveraging expertise from IT, Comms and HR.
Ongoing support to the team tasked with managing governance so that these new practices are adopted into everyday working and can be applied continuously.

A project of this nature can be delivered in a discrete manner by working with a small group of stakeholders, who will then continue to play a hands-on role in the management of governance. Typically, we can create a new governance model in around 8–12 weeks and provide ongoing support for 3 months.

If the topic of governance resonates with you, please contact us; we would be happy to talk further about how we could support you and share more about our previous work.