Learn More About Digital Governance Software
What is Digital Governance Software?
Digital governance is a concept used by businesses to describe the management of their digital environments while ensuring compliance, security, and accessibility. Digital governance solutions have emerged to provide centralized control over the various standards a business employs regarding the digital experience and security of their user base.
Many of these tools help businesses start from scratch by providing frameworks that outline governance-related responsibilities and determine an owner responsible for each process or task. Once frameworks have been developed, strategies and policies must be outlined to ensure all standards are met and operational processes flow smoothly. These policies come in many forms. Security policies help protect users and their data. Compliance and accessibility policies ensure all individuals can use a product and that all regulatory standards are met. Other common digital governance policies include branding alignment, intellectual property (IP) protection, domain management, and social media guidelines.
What are the Common Features of Digital Governance Software?
Digital governance software provides a wide range of features, and here are a few of the most common ones found in the market.
Digital media monitoring: Monitoring features help users manage messaging and ensure standards are met within digital advertising campaigns.
Compliance monitoring: Additional monitoring features are often designed to monitor data, privacy, and accessibility compliance requirements.
Social media monitoring: Social media monitoring features log social media activity, ensuring subject matter stays relevant to company goals.
User, role, and access management: Individual identity management features allow administrators to grant access to select data, features, objects, and so on based on the users, user role, groups, etc.
Policies and controls: Policy enforcement provides the ability to control file and folder access by user or group, external sharing permissions, editing policies, device location restrictions, sharing by device, and so on.
Security: Security features allow administrators to set standards for asset and risk management.
Reporting: Reporting features provide the ability to create reports that meet particular business requirements.
Brand design consistency: This feature monitors brand assets to ensure content is consistent with the design of the site.
SEO standards: SEO standards may refer to pagination, page headers and titles, meta tags, and URL structure that contribute well to site SEO.
Internationalization: Internationalization allows multinational organizations to use these tools effectively across multiple languages and currencies.
Web accessibility: Accessibility features are used to ensure the availability of accessibility tools and to provide information on how individuals are using accommodation tools to interact with the site.
What are the Benefits of Digital Governance Software?
Managing a website, application, online community, or any other digital environment is now much more complicated than it used to be. Digital governance solutions provide structure for organizations that are unsure of how to delegate tasks and enforce consistent policies across a business’s online visibility. These shared responsibilities must be accounted for if a business or team wants to ensure long-term accessibility and usability for their offerings available online.
Companies struggling to manage a website, for example, might improve their efficiency if standards are sent for content, media, linking, and site structure. They also must be aware of and account for various regulatory standards for security, privacy, and accessibility. Digital governance solutions help businesses to both develop these processes and delegate ownership to individuals, but also to enable continual maintenance and ensure quality standards are met at all times.
Cross-functional alignment: The operational impact of digital governance solutions provides a significant level of interdepartmental and inter-team alignment. When workflows are put into place, alerts or triggers inform individuals of tasks they’re required to complete. For example, a company has a website storing some sensitive information. The digital governance platform’s monitoring feature discovers the exposed data and it alerts the administrator. This triggers a task for the individual responsible for encrypting sensitive data. That individual discovers it is an integration issue and communicates with the team responsible for that. The team members collaboratively discuss the issue and follow the steps required to resolve the issue outlined in the governance framework.
Standards and compliance: Standards and compliance refers to a company’s posture in meeting both internal standards and those outlined in governmental regulations. Companies can use digital governance solutions to outline and enforce standards related to publishing, data quality, technical needs, or anything else the company sets a standard for. Compliance needs will typically relate to protecting personal information, hiding sensitive data, and ensuring tax requirements are met. Digital governance platforms allow users to outline and prioritize requirements, then enforce these policies and monitor environments continuously to ensure standards are met.
Usability and accessibility: Companies use digital governance solutions to improve user experience (i.e., an individual’s first-hand experience with a product). With standards in place, teams are enabled to set alerts for broken links, malfunctioning media, slow performance, and more. When issues related to these standards emerge, teams are informed and resolution processes trigger tasks for relevant individuals to take. Meeting accessibility requirements help enable differently-abled individuals to use software or navigate websites. Digital governance tools ensure that individuals with vision, hearing, and motor impairments, as well as those who speak different languages, can utilize a company’s products or website.
Who Uses Digital Governance Software?
Digital governance solutions are designed to enable teams to collaborate across departments and ensure digital ecosystems meet standards at every level. Here are a few examples of typical digital governance users.
IT staff: IT staff may be responsible for any number of governance tasks. The most common use case here is ensuring data quality and eliminating technical issues impacting usability. These individuals may also be responsible for alerting other teams, establishing digital standards, and maintaining the digital governance platform itself.
Operations teams: Operations teams may be tasked with implementing the digital governance software and setting standards. They are often a part of designing workflows and operational handoffs. They may also be responsible for managing the software themselves.
Security teams: Security teams likely have a more tangential role when it comes to digital governance. These teams may be alerted of security risks or exposed data and it is expected of them to remediate the issue. In smaller companies, these teams may also be in charge of enforcing several data privacy compliance standards as well.
Digital media teams: Digital media teams may usually be involved at the end of workflows to fix grammar issues, broken links, media that fails to load, and other non-technical issues related to text, video, and audio content.
Software Related to Digital Governance Software
The following technology families are either closely related to digital governance solutions or there is a significant overlap between product functionality.
Digital experience monitoring (DEM) software: DEM solutions are designed to monitor end users and ensure applications are available. Monitoring is one of the functionalities of digital governance software, but it typically won’t provide the same level of individual analysis. If an application was down, the digital governance product would instead provide an alert to the individuals responsible for fixing an application.
Digital experience platforms (DXP): DXP offers the same features as DEM solutions and much more. These solutions have the functionality to manage content and store media, build simple applications, and integrate data. This is significantly more all-encompassing than a digital governance solution.
Governance, risk & compliance (GRC) software: General GRC solutions provide risk analysis and help companies meet compliance across industries. These platforms are designed to facilitate every part of the compliance processes related to general business operations and vertical industry-specific compliance needs while a digital governance solution simply informs teams that some component of their digital ecosystem is not compliant.
Website accessibility testing and website accessibility software: Website accessibility solutions are uniquely designed to test and maintain website accessibility. However, these solutions typically won’t help teams build cross-functional workflows, allocate responsibilities, or facilitate workflows to meet these accessibility needs.
How to Buy Digital Governance Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Digital Governance Software
The first step to purchasing a digital governance software is to outline the options and develop a framework for outlining digital standards. From there, software buyers should identify tools that provide some combination of features intended to enforce the standards the user has chosen.
Compare Digital Governance Software Products
Create a long list
Companies should outline the various online mediums they would like to govern and identify tools that support all required environments. Additionally, companies should be sure what combination of features they will need, such as consistency monitoring, accessibility monitoring, and compliance monitoring.
Create a short list
Once the long list is created, buyers can shorten it based on a variety of factors. These factors may include information available from real user reviews, industry analysts, as well as peers. At this point, pricing information can be gathered and products outside the buyer’s range can be eliminated.
Conduct demos
For the products with all desired features that fit within the buyer’s budget, they can reach out to the vendors to schedule a demo. This is their time to win the buyer over. They should bring all relevant personnel involved with the tool and its implementation to ensure a well-rounded evaluation.
Selection of Digital Governance Software
Choose a selection team
To choose a selection team, decision makers need to involve subject matter experts from all teams in the company that will use the system. When purchasing digital governance software, this selection team primarily involves IT managers, content creators, and digital marketing staff. Any manager or department-level leader should also include individuals managing any solution the product will be integrating with.
Negotiation
Depending on the maturity of the business, the seniority of the negotiation team when buying solutions may vary. It is advisable to include relevant directors or managers in the marketing, product, and IT departments as well as from any other cross-functional departments that may be impacted.
Final decision
While the decision likely sits in the hands of one or two individuals, the opinions of each relevant party should be considered.
What Does Digital Governance Software Cost?
Most digital governance software solutions will offer typical software as a service (SaaS) licensing which means customers pay a varied amount based on usage. Usage can refer to the number of individual accounts a customer may have, or to various scaling bandwidth-usage metrics.
Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI can be somewhat difficult to measure for these tools as most of the benefits are not centered around revenue. Still, it can be guaranteed that customers would much prefer vendors who present content online consistently and without error rather than a less organized vendor. So if online quality control is a focus area for a business, ROI will be met quickly.
