On Digital and IT Governance
Hi everybody, it has been awhile! My last post on here was in 2018 looking at user generated content in museums. How time flies! Things for me have changed quite a bit since then and I am working on getting back into publishing more in 2023.
Since joining Ingenium — Canada’s museums of science and innovation in January 2021, I have been tasked with aligning our digital presence to our strategic plan, re-organizing our team and initiating a modernization of our digital ecosystem. After 6 months of getting to know the corporation I realized that one of the biggest challenges we faced was to clarify how digital products and services are initiated, developed, and supported. The need to collaborate across departments on developing foundational processes that will enable our digital output to be more sustainable, efficient, and strategic was essential to overcoming this challenge. This work has been collaborative, challenging, and very rewarding.
Museums and policies
Museums have policies and processes for all sorts of things like exhibitions and collections development, privacy, accessibility, finance, even deaccessioning. But when it comes to digital, processes seemed less well defined. I’ll admit, Digital and IT governance policy sounds very bureaucratic and dry. It sounds like red tape.
In fact, it is the opposite. Governance is not about hindering good ideas, it is about ensuring those good ideas are well supported and executed through to production and lifecycle maintenance. Effectively, what we are talking about is a clear set of processes, including roles and responsibilities to initiate, develop, and maintain a digital initiative. The definition I like best is by Lisa Welchman from her book, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design.
Digital governance is a framework for establishing accountability, roles, decision-making, and change management authority for an organization’s digital presence.
In March-April 2020 the world ground to a halt and physical visitation was erased at most museums, the move to “put everything online” added immense pressure to digital staff who had been “putting everything online” for decades. Through the pandemic it became imperative that some form of structure, or guidance be put in place. For many museums, the flood gates had opened but not necessarily in a strategic way. There was pressure to get everything out all at once and the quantity of museum digital content in those first months of the pandemic was evident across the industry. As the pandemic dragged on, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to notice there was a fatigue that had set in among museum digital departments. Sometimes, it is ok to run fast and loose, but it isn’t sustainable.
After my first six months, in June 2021, I started looking around for examples of Digital and IT governance policy instruments in the museum industry. When I reached out broadly, not many in my network had a policy but there was a small group who were on the hunt for one as well.
After my initial exploratory tweet, a small group of museum colleagues met with the one person we found who had a museum digital governance policy instrument. We were blown away by the clarity.
Ingenium’s Digital Governance Working Group
Also in June 2021, an internal working group was launched at Ingenium to collaborate and develop our own Digital and IT governance policy instrument. The group was championed by our Executive Leadership Team (ELT), and we developed a clear terms of reference for the working group. Representation was broad, with colleagues joining the group from Digital, IT, Curatorial and Information Management, Exhibitions and Interpretation, as well as Visitor and Member services. I chaired the group and our Director of IT was co-chair. The input from colleagues across the corporation was essential to delivering this policy instrument.
While external examples are helpful, we all know each museum has unique characteristics and challenges that need to be taken into account. After looking at these external examples with the internal group, there was quick alignment for the need of some structure and process around initiating new digital activities and planning for digital product lifecycle management that made sense for Ingenium. After a few months of discussion, research, and connecting with external colleagues, the working group began to develop our new policy instrument to bring clarity to our digital efforts.
Defining element: The Why
First and foremost, this policy instrument needed to be clear about why it was needed. As already stated, it is not meant to hinder innovation or good ideas. Rather, governance should establish a process that will bring greater clarity and transparency for digital activities across Ingenium. As the internal working group first started meeting, we all understood that we needed to articulate not only what a Digital and IT governance policy instrument would do but why we needed it.
The group settled on the below ten statements:
· To facilitate digital transformations effectively
· To formalize accountabilities and quality controls
· To clarify horizontal integrations of digital operations across the corporation
· To strengthen the mitigation of cybersecurity and reputational risks
· To increase operational efficiencies
· To improve interoperability
· To enrich data capture and analysis
· To ensure cost-effective digital solutions
· To manage lifecycle cost-effectively & ensure proper capitalization of digital products
· To bring greater value to Ingenium audiences
Sounds pretty good, right? That was the easy part. Once the working group had reached consensus and articulated these expectations, we dug in and started discussing next steps. We knew we needed to provide clarity around the what and the who that are involved in this new policy instrument.
Defining elements: The What
As many of you know, clarifying what is included within “digital” is difficult. There are many ways you can slice and dice “digital.” For clarity’s sake (and the working group’s sanity) we placed digital into two buckets, SaaS solutions and Infrastructure, and custom built Digital Products.
The SaaS and Infrastructure bucket includes anything that utilizes a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis. Examples of SaaS and Infrastructure that we included in this area include cloud-based services, collections management systems, ticketing, customer resource management solutions, internal/external email solutions, project management and file sharing solutions, VOIP, wi-fi, virtual servers.
The Digital Products bucket includes any software and/or hardware enabled product that offers some form of service, utility, and/or content or learning experience to external/internal stakeholders. Examples we included in this area are corporate websites, intranet, web and native applications, application programming interfaces (APIs), games, and interactives. Digital products are further divided between those that are included as part of an exhibition and those for other onsite as well as online engagement.
This may seem simple but it was months of discussion and compromise. As I said earlier, there are a multitude of ways you can organize “digital” and like museums themselves, everybody does it differently. The next step was the who.
Defining elements: The Who
Another challenge we found was that in some cases it was unclear who was leading different aspects of a digital initiative. It was also sometimes unclear what responsibilities they had and how they interacted with different departments or individuals. These individual roles that would lead or have ownership over certain aspects of those initiatives needed to be clarified. After much discussion, we landed on three roles and their responsibilities.
Business Owner — This role is typically accountable for a service or program they provide that requires a digital product or SaaS solution to deliver that function and are therefore the originator of requests to acquire or develop new digital products or SaaS solutions.
Technology Owner — This role is accountable for selecting, acquiring or developing the best digital solutions for the corporation. For any digital product or SaaS, the technical responsibility would lie with the Technology owner. This role makes technology decisions based on business requirements defined by internal and external stakeholders (such as the Business and/or Content Owners).
Content Owner — This role is accountable for the development, integrity, relevance, and accuracy of their content and data housed in a digital product or SaaS. As the designated subject matter expert in their respective fields, content owners provide input in the identification of business requirements to help select, acquire or develop a digital product or SaaS.
Now that we had clearly defined the roles and responsibilities within this policy, we needed to nail down the process or how this was all going to work.
Defining elements: The How
Starting with the what and the who enabled us to start thinking about how these essential pieces could fit into a clear process for delivering digital initiatives. The how is the transparent process that would enable strategic alignment of digital within Ingenium and is the nuts and bolts of how we move digital initiatives forward. There is a similar process for exhibition development and now digital is embedded within that process. The below diagram clearly (we hope) articulates how this policy instrument functions.
Step 1: New digital products and SaaS are initiated by the Business Owner (content/technology owners can be business owners) and obtain their Senior Management Team member’s (SMT) pre-approval.
- New initiatives are organized into one of three streams and follow a defined approval and development process based on their scope.
- For exhibitions, the exhibition project brief includes digital product information and the Chief Digital Officer sits on the core exhibitions team.
Step 2: The Business Owner then engages the Technology Owners in a discussion.
- In all cases as a first gate of the decision tree, the Technology Owners (the Chief Digital Officer and the Director, Information Technology) will be required to endorse the request based on a set of Decision-Making Criteria before proceeding to the next step.
- The Technology owners maintain a 360 degree view of SaaS and Infrastructure as well as Digital Products across Ingenium.
Step 3: Once endorsement has been received, the digital initiative can move forward to one of three development and implementation workflows.
- Depending on the budget, the initiative may need one more sign-off from ELT.
- These development workflows are fairly standard digital processes that detail procurement, development (Alpha, Beta, RC), testing, and QA stages and/or timelines.
This is really the nuts and bolts of the Digital and IT governance policy instrument and is our first step to providing clarity around how digital initiatives are actioned at Ingenium. While this process is clear, we need to also ensure transparency around how decisions are made by the Technology Owners.
Decision Making Criteria
As outlined above, the Technology Owners ensure strategic alignment but they also ensure duplication does not take place. While this is essential, it is also important to have transparent decision making. The internal working group settled on the three criteria below:
Scope — The Business Owner has vetted the project with internal stakeholders and communicated a clear and well-defined value proposition and impact assessment. The scope is aligned with Ingenium strategic goals and outcomes. SMT approval is a pre-requisite.
Schedule — The project may be reasonably completed within the timeframe or completion date specified. The project does not create a resource conflict with other (possibly competing) projects or corporate priorities. If the project is attached to external agreements (grant funding, partnership agreements, etc.), the timelines must adhere to those agreed upon contractual obligations.
Cost — The Business Owner has available funds to complete the project or has planned with supporting business units to cover the full costs of this project including the life-cycle management of the project (maintenance, upgrades, etc.).
The last piece of the puzzle was including a well defined plan for lifecycle management.
Digital Lifecycle Management
At Ingenium we endeavour to follow the below digital product lifecycle matrix and take an iterative approach to our products, a product growth mindset is a key to the corporation’s digital success. This includes budgeting for the product for its entire lifecycle, including upgrades, and maintenance.
The Digital Product lifecycle matrix includes planning for the end of life. If not already outlined in the New Initiative Discovery Proposal Form, Project Intake Form, or the Exhibition Project Brief, the decommissioning of a digital product can begin to be discussed by the Business, Technology, and Content Owners at the end of the maturity phase (18-month post launch).
Conclusion
This is the first iteration of a Digital and IT governance policy instrument at Ingenium, it will not be our last. The working group launched in the summer of 2021 and the final policy instrument received ELT approval in the fall of 2022. This was just a few month shy of 18 months of work. Through external research and internal collaboration we felt this was a good start and we are already seeing great results since launching this new policy in the summer/fall of 2022.
Digital governance is like your digital presence, it is ever evolving but it also has to start somewhere. I am proud of the collaborative work the internal working group did to create this new policy instrument and I am excited about its potential to bring better products and services to our audiences from coast-to-coast-to-coast.
