Better design through Web Governance

Quite often the people at the top of the business know what is broken and are trying desperately to fix it, while the people at the coal face can see the solutions but are unable to act. So what's going on here?

It seems to me that there's a mid level of management responsible for turning strategy into tactics. So it's their job to understand the business goals and communicate them to the experts in a way that ensures the problems find a good solution. If this was their only responsibility, I think we'd be in a good place. However a lot of the time this middle tier also start filtering solutions and this is where things start to go wrong.

I'm a firm believer that the people with the most experience in a particular facet of business should be the ones making the decisions for that facet. As such it would be nonsensical for the tech team to be making core financial decisions, as it would for the finance department to drive the technical infrastructure. So why do product managers, designers and UX practitioners constantly find their recommendations being overridden by managers from different departments with little experience in digital.

I think one of the problems lies in the hierarchical approach to management which is a layover of the industrial age. There has always been the assumption that as you rise up the hierarchy you gain more knowledge than the people below you and are therefore more capable of making important decisions.

However in the knowledge age this process is often reversed, with the people at the top forced to rely on the experts below them. Sadly a lot of mid level managers still believe they are in the former model and end up prioritising their opinions over the expertise of others.

This is one reason why I really like the idea of Web Governance. The idea is simple — to put in place a governance strategy that explains how decisions get made in the digital sphere.

Web Governance allows an organisation to identify the experts in a range of different disciplines and cede responsibility for those areas over to them, even if they happen to be lower in the organisational hierarchy. For instance, the governance document may state that a senior stakeholder has responsibility for delivering a set of business objective and metrics, but that UI decisions are the ultimate responsibility of the head of UX.

Imagine working in an organisation where the head of UX actually had genuine responsibility for the user experience of their product and can turn down bad poor ideas if they can't be demonstrated to be in the service of a specific set of business outcomes.

Of course, there will be times when these issues clash, so the governance document needs to include information about who needs to be consulted on various decisions. However the goal here is to encourage discussion and negotiation over blanket control based on status alone.

The main thing here is to clearly set out the roles and responsibilities of each individual, rather than have them implied by status or inferred by domain. It's also about breaking out of the traditional corporate hierarchy and allowing experts to have decision making responsibilities that can override more senior members in certain well defined areas.

Web governance feels like an effective solution to me and all the documentation I've reason on the subject so far seems extremely logical and positive. So if you're struggling to get your expertise heard, maybe it's time to start thinking about a governance strategy.