Digital Policy: Powering Operations, Innovation, and Velocity
Welcome to A Smarter World. This is your host, Cruce Saunders, and I’m joined today with Kristina Podnar. She was a digital policy innovator for over two decades, she’s worked with some of the most high-profile companies to balance the risk and opportunity of conducting business in the digital age. Kristina is the principal of Native Trust Consulting. Her book, , was published in March 2019. Welcome to the show. Kristina, thanks for joining.
Kristina
Thanks for having me. So much fun to be here.
Cruce
It is. And we get to be in person here in Washington, D.C., which is one of the homes for digital policy governance and the considerations therein, which is a big topic as new regulations are pouring into the consciousness of the digital community. And many people are starting to look at privacy, starting to look at the regulatory environment, accessibility, and other forms of interaction with global markets and their regulations as something that needs careful attention. And so you couldn’t be talking about a more important topic at a more important time.
You tell your kids they can go out there, they can play, they can do whatever they want to. They just can’t leave the confines of your backyard and that fence. It’s there to keep them safe. Now, they can do lots of crazy things. They can take the broom maybe that’s out there or the rake and they can pretend it’s a horse. They can race worms like my child used to do. They can throw sand up in the air and pretend it’s snowing.
But the reality is that they’re safe in that backyard. We know they’re not going to get run over by a car. We know nothing bad is going to happen to them. And when they’re ready for dinner, they can come inside. And it’s the same thing with policies. When you actually create policies, what you create for the organization, the enterprise for content creators or anybody else who is involved in digital is a nice, safe place where they can be creative, they can be innovative. @kpodnar
They can do all kinds of stuff knowing that they’re not going to either put the brand at risk or break a law or go against any kind of regulation that’s out there. And that’s really the power of digital policy and the way that I think about it.
The reason that most sites today, for example, aren’t accessible isn’t because people don’t believe in accessibility. But for a lot of people, they haven’t had that “aha” moment to make the connections between it’s not just about some crazy law in the United States or the fact that it’s legally required in Israel to have an accessible website. It’s the fact that all of a sudden users have a great user experience, not just if they’re blind or they’re deaf, but maybe they have carpal tunnel because they’re getting older and they’ve used their mouse for too many years.
It’s about the fact that they create good experiences that then translate into loyalty, word of mouth brand promulgation, all kinds of really good stuff. And so, most of the it’s time explaining the “why” and helping people to understand that they’re really enabled within the framework and understanding that really policy is not a burden. They’re not handcuffs. What they are is a way to be free and innovative and color within the lines with any color you want.
Cruce
There’s a lot of relationship, I think, with content structural standards here. We want to be able to give authors a structural model to work within. But if it’s done well, that should actually be freedom enabling because the content doesn’t have to be restructured every time it’s put into a new application. It can just be used from its raw structural elements that have been predefined.
And so there’s a painting, there’s guidelines, there’s a painting within the coloring book that’s provided that’s there. So it removes the do anything you want, anywhere you want. But it also creates freedom in that, too. Can you talk a little bit about that balance between flexibility for independent business contributors and the structure that we’re providing as a way to help make sure that contribution works within a larger environment, larger ecosystem in a graded way? @mrcruce
For example, how do we reference our company? Are we a very formal company? Are we informal? How does that resonate with our brand? And so there are some things that we always consistently apply, but then we actually look at our individualism and say, “Well, you know what? If you’re in Italy, you’re going to have a very friendly tone, maybe a little bit more informal. If you’re in Germany, it’s going to be far more formal.” Right.
They knew that they could submit to legal in all the crazy different variations of here’s what the content looks like on an iPad versus an iPhone versus an Android device versus a computer screen. And that was part of the submission package. Not a lot of back and forth after that. Why? Legal sees it, signs off on it. Brand sees it, signs off on it right away. And after that, you don’t even have to worry about the rest of the workflow that you did before, because we’ve already baked in all of those requirements.
And it’s almost like they’re pre-vetted. And so for that organization in particular, they got to the point where if it is something like a coronavirus situation and a major outbreak or maybe Ebola outbreak, where you really have to have almost like an emergency communication piece. They can actually do that now within one day, where it’s only the really critical folks that have to sign off. And what’s interesting is the integrity of the content. It’s great that we got 21 to three days.
So I really see policies as a support and enablement function within the organization. It can be driven from a marketing or a legal perspective, most likely. But what it needs to be is a comprehensive end to end viewpoint. And somebody who knows enough to ask the questions of like, “Wow, you know, I know we’re into
That actually is the application of a pattern that is enabling scale regardless of silo and the same thing with content sets, semantics and policy. What’s interesting …. let me propose something we’ve been working with clients on org structure. We have this concept of the content services organization.
We’re building these in a couple of places. It reports to either a CDO, Chief Digital Officer, or a Chief Customer Officer, somebody in customer experience, but it’s outside of marketing. It’s outside of legal, it’s sort of a independent organization that operates with a mandate to facilitate content asset flow use across an organization. Would policy make sense as a seat in that kind of org?
I’m happy if it’s an independent function. In a way, I almost don’t care where it sits as long as we have it. I think we’ll have natural patterns in the future. And I’m starting to see the first generation of digital native lawyers coming in who get the fact that it’s not just about the law, it’s about the user experience. So maybe in like 15, 20, 30 years we’ll be there. We’re not there yet.
And I’m seeing really smart people who are sitting in marketing and they kind of get GDPR, they kind of get CCPA, but it’s not their day job. And so that’s really, really hard. Maybe having somebody in the CDO office is really the right mix. What I care about though, is that they have that right skillset and that right mentality rather than where they report in the organization.
Because it matters less where they’re really plugged in as much as the value they’re bringing to the organization and making sure that they’re actually the advocate for balancing out those risks and opportunities.
Yeah, I know, people go, “What?” This is not the policeman. And it’s like, no. To me, it’s not the policemen of the world. And I’ll tell you why. Because I think that authority can be delegated to digital policy stewards. But I very much subscribe to Lisa Welchman’s governance model, where you actually have within the governance framework folks at the very top, who are getting things like metrics fed back to them of are we doing in digital what we ought to be doing?
And so the digital policy steward is definitely accountable for things like ensuring that the policies are working or that metrics are coming out that show it’s either working or not working. But I would argue that their job should not be a policeman and should not be accountability for that from the perspective of enforcement. What they ought to be doing is actually kind of flipping that on its head and being that support and enablement model.
Because it’s a lot easier to get people to buy in and give them the tools that they need than it is to take a stick and run around the organization and try and beat them. And I think ultimately the buck stops with higher-ups because it’s not just about “did you adopt the policies and the standards?” It’s about “did I, from a leadership perspective, give you the resources necessary to actually apply those policies and standards”, if that makes any sense.
Cruce
So you invoked Lisa’s name and I am a huge fan of Lisa’s work. Lisa Welchman has a really strong book that I think everybody should read on governance. But I am wondering if you could help relate digital policy with governance and how they overlap. How do they diverge and what is the right relationship between policy and governance?
Kristina
Now, that’s a really great question. In fact, I’m very grateful to Lisa for including me in her book on the digital policy section. So she was kind enough to invite me to collaborate and give some feedback during that process. And it’s interesting to me because people don’t understand that correlation. Yet there’s a really strong correlation that we need to be aware of.