By Janus Boye
Who owns digital? This has been a much debated topic over the past two decades.
According to Jonathan Sullivan, a Boye group member and chief digital officer at American The Health Management Academy, this question has a very simple answer:
“Everyone owns digital”
In this blog post, Jonathan argues why everyone owns and should own digital and why digital leaders should move beyond the question of digital ownership.
Digital ownership question is no longer useful
There has been a lot of debate over the past twenty years about where ownership of digital—web, e-commerce, blogs, user generated content, social media, email marketing, mobile, wearables, the Internet of Things—ought to reside within an organization.
I have often found myself in the middle of this debate (and sometimes instigated it) over the years. The result, as our very own Stephen Emmott recently noted, is that
for many organizations, digital is accommodated rather than assimilated into the structure and operation of the whole.
Recently, I have concluded that the question of “who owns digital” is no longer useful to helping organizations cope with the disruption of digital transformation and that it is time for digital leaders to move beyond this struggle.
Why everyone owns digital
Digital is now integral to every aspect of business (whether an organization has acknowledged it or not). Digital is no longer a separate business function, but is simply the way that business is done, all across the enterprise, all the time. Therefore, digital is now the responsibility of everyone in the organization (whether they have acknowledged it or not). Everyone in the organization owns digital.
Everyone owns digital not only in the context of their specific area of responsibility, but also as it pertains to the success of the organization as a whole. I think most digital professionals could agree with the former, but why the latter?
Digital by its nature involves customer experiences and data that cross business lines. Each individual digital experience created within an organization—even something as granular as the copy within a particular content item—is inherently part of the business’s overall digital customer experience. Each one also generates data, which has value beyond the context of that individual digital experience.
What digital means to non-digital roles
Let us look at an example of what it means for someone in a non-digital role—a subject matter expert who creates content—to “own digital.” Beginning at the most fundamental level, a content creator should be aware that their content will be used digitally, either in whole or in part—possibly in ways that are not yet known to them.
This has ramifications for how the piece will be composed. It also has ramifications beyond the traditional endpoint of accountability for content creators; the point at which they click “publish” in the CMS, or—gulp—hit the “Print to PDF” button in Microsoft Office. There are questions the content creators should ask themselves. What opportunities might exist for presenting this content digitally? Is there something about the audience, the context, or the content itself that suggests a potential digital usage or presentation? What has been learned from previous customer interactions with similar content that could improve execution on the current piece?
Stretching the boundaries of accountability even further, the content creator should think about how their content relates to other activities of the business. Has there been content created elsewhere which is complementary to this content, or to which this content can be linked to expand the overall content ecosystem? This example demonstrates how digital considerations are relevant to the traditional responsibilities of those in non-digital roles, and how digital pushes them to act beyond the boundaries of their traditional job descriptions.
Your role as a digital leader
What does it mean for digital leaders, if everyone in the organization owns digital? Aren’t we the digital experts? What is our role, if everyone is supposed to “wear a digital hat?”
The role of digital leaders will continue to be much as it has always been—to be the subject matter experts on how all of the aspects of digital can be used to benefit the organization. This means supplying the vision, evangelizing new digital tools and practices, providing governance, and modeling new approaches to doing business with digital.
Where our role will differ is in the doing. If digital is no longer a separate business function, but is simply the way that business is done, all across the enterprise, all the time, then digital execution cannot be contained within, or even controlled by, one part of the business. Our role is to go out into the business and empower non-digital subject matter experts to enter into the digital mindset, through education, partnership, the development of workflows, and yes, even by holding them accountable.
It is time for digital leaders to move beyond the question of ownership over digital. The reality of today’s business environment is that digital is a widely distributed business function in which everyone in an organization shares responsibility. As digital leaders we should take the lead in embracing this reality and advance an “everyone owns digital” mindset within our organizations.