Digital governance helps your organization remain agile and responsive as the world evolves around it. It ensures digital activities are carried out ethically, legal issues or cyber attacks are avoided, and technology is used effectively in order to maximize impact.

Establish a formal policy and clear accountability measures, empower teams, establish leadership that champions it all and facilitate participation for all participants.

Strategy

Digital governance entails setting forth accountability, roles, and decision-making authority for your organization’s digital presence online – including websites, mobile sites, social media accounts, or any products and services made available via Internet or web.

Set clear calculated digital success metrics, such as regulatory compliance, transparency and auditability, mission impact, efficiency, workforce safety and productivity, modern practices and tools such as human-centered design, co-creation, journey mapping and life event mapping to measure digital success metrics.

Create SMART objectives for each focus area in your framework, making sure they are measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Utilizing key performance indicators (KPIs) for each objective to track progress over time; KPIs could include user satisfaction rates, completion rates or cost savings as appropriate to its goal. Include these KPIs into your digital governance framework and monitor them over time.

Planning

Digital governance procedures need to be tailored specifically for each organization, while keeping some general principles in mind. One key principle should be establishing ownership and accountability – someone must take ownership for every facet of your digital presence and ultimately account for adhering to any governing policies in place.

Focusing on tools with scalability should also be a top priority, to address ongoing challenges as they emerge. For instance, if your agency must comply with accessibility regulations such as those found within the American Disability Act (ADA), having an accessible platform is crucial.

Fostering cross-sector collaboration can also be immensely advantageous, enabling you to learn from others and foster public trust in your processes. Furthermore, cross-sector cooperation allows you to more efficiently manage risks while aligning policies with overall governance strategies.

Design

An effective digital governance policy framework is crucial to your organization’s long-term success, enabling the design, production and ongoing maintenance of products such as websites, apps and progressive web apps designed to adapt over time.

Digital governance allows the creation and maintenance of services designed to expand over time, such as social media, email marketing, content management systems and e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, for many public-purpose organizations with large data collections such as hospitals or financial institutions that also store personal information securely, such as healthcare and financial institutions, digital governance also ensures compliance with privacy and security regulations.

Digital governance takes many different forms. Each approach may suit certain business models or organizational environments more effectively than another; ultimately it is up to each organization to select their ideal model based on their unique situation.

Implementation

As digital communications evolve, retaining oversight of how information is communicated online platforms can become more challenging. A robust digital governance policy can ensure that new tools and technologies are used ethically, securely and for public good.

Public-purpose organisations must prioritize investment in digital infrastructure to keep up with audience expectations and improve services, while protecting data against cyber attacks which could have serious legal and reputational repercussions.

To facilitate these efforts, a digital governance framework must include clear roles and responsibilities for different stakeholders, an open communication plan and regular audits. Furthermore, ongoing education and training on best digital governance practices is also crucial.

Monitoring

Digital governance demands an ongoing, holistic approach from its board members. Board members should remain abreast of digital governance developments and best practices through continued education on platforms like Coursera, edX and LinkedIn Learning; industry publications from Gartner or McKinsey reports should also be made accessible.

Prioritising investments in digital infrastructure investments is of utmost importance for public-purpose organisations that aim to improve decision making and service delivery. Furthermore, such systems enable government agencies to more easily engage citizens, increase transparency and foster social responsibility.

Government agencies must establish digital governance policies and standards that outline roles and responsibilities and establish standards, while creating consensus, building skills and capacity, and meeting sustainability goals. A framework also helps foster consensus while supporting sustainability goals.