Digital governance is an indispensable framework for organizations looking to thrive in today’s digital environment. It helps organizations avoid legal issues and cyber attacks, remain flexible when disruption strikes, and ultimately meet their missions successfully.
Create a digital governance strategy by mapping stakeholder interests, creating a task force to represent diverse viewpoints, and framing any primary governance problems you wish to address.
1. Increased Efficiency
Digital governance helps organizations improve efficiency by setting clear metrics and processes to track digital performance data. Nonprofits can then utilize this information to make more informed decisions for improvement.
Digital transparency enables agencies to make their processes and operations public and easy for anyone to comprehend – something especially helpful when working with external partners. Furthermore, this also ensures everyone knows where their work fits within the larger picture as well as their responsibilities and obligations.
Digital governance choices also affect the value of networks by shaping their appeal to human participants. For example, programmable control can increase efficiency and standardization while simultaneously weakening relational ties (Livingston & Hodgson 2023). A careful design of digital governance must avoid alienating human participants.
2. Increased Security
Digital governance provides the framework necessary for setting standards and procedures as well as clarifying roles and responsibilities, helping ensure compliance while decreasing risk.
Digital governance can also contribute to greater security and privacy. A strong governance structure can ensure that data is safe from malicious attacks while access is only granted to authorized individuals.
As part of your digital governance strategy implementation process, include those affected in its creation process. This will give them an opportunity to provide their input and ensure it meets their needs while also increasing buy-in and support for its implementation.
3. Increased Customer Satisfaction
Establishing a solid digital governance framework enables businesses to stay compliant with law, protect against cyber attacks and adapt quickly in the face of disruptions. This is especially essential for organisations with large amounts of data where security and privacy must be considered.
An essential principle of digital governance is prioritising citizen needs and participation, which can be realized via platforms facilitating democratic decision-making, feedback mechanisms, accessible digital services and open data initiatives that promote transparency; open data initiatives have even proven their worth in holding government entities to account (Santana & Albareda 2022).
Though no governance mechanism can completely eliminate unintended outcomes, businesses should make efforts to minimize them. This may involve conducting research, forming a task force and revising strategies as time progresses.
4. Increased Competitiveness
Digital governance helps companies remain flexible and agile – both essential traits for staying ahead of the competition. Without it, teams may become bogged down with internal pressures or rush projects which end up only serving current needs or missing larger goals altogether.
Marketers frequently assemble tools in response to immediate business challenges, but without a guiding framework or consensus among team members these solutions may not be sustainable and threaten future goals. Good digital governance helps create consensus around best practices – including auditing current tools and creating sustainability criteria for any future purchases.
As China and other authoritarian regimes seek to increase their control over the internet, the United States must regain its leadership role in global digital governance. To do so will require careful maneuvering between domestic political divides to create a global governance model which promotes principles such as internet freedom and privacy.
5. Increased Productivity
Digitized governance keeps companies agile and adaptive – two essential traits in an age of disruption. A robust framework ensures your organisation can quickly change marketing platforms or onboard new employees without incurring extra rework or red tape.
Digital governance ensures that people and platforms within your organisation align with your digital strategy and overall organizational objectives, making measuring effectiveness of your digital initiatives much simpler.
But defining digital governance responsibilities remains a difficult challenge. For example, in large digital networks where pseudonymity reigns supreme, who is accountable for illegal activities, biased decision-making or technical errors? Ambiguous responsibilities could even lead to platform exit – as evidenced by recent protests targeting Facebook and Twitter.