Digital Governance, isn't it time it reached the boardroom?

15 Jul 2015

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Millions of pounds continue to be spent by organisations on their websites but the reality is that much of it is wasted as basic failings behind the scenes in terms of quality and compliance are hampering performance and alienating customers - Digital Governance, is it time it reached the boardroom?

The problem is that senior executives have to date largely relied on web providers to deliver their online presence while relying on the same suppliers to monitor and measure their own performance. Herein lays the rub.

Not only is it riddled with conflict, but evidence points to the fact that if could be in someone else’s best interest to keep executives in the dark about website failings.

Boards in all sectors of the economy need to ask the relevant questions of their internal and external web providers to ensure they are not exposed to problems. Simply being told that everything is okay isn’t sufficient.

There needs to be a clear independent demonstration that 'Digital Governance' standards are being continually assessed and met, risks are being considered and the brand is protected – without any of the fluff or technical jargon only they understand.

Everyone who uses the internet will have been frustrated by website failings but in many cases senior executives are continually told by their web suppliers that these problems are ‘not on our site’. Since Sitemorse continues to find numerous issues on most sites then so will any other visitor.

The upside is that such issues are easy to address. Research from Sitemorse of the Top UK Public 100 companies found the key reason for website failures was simply a result of pages not being tested properly. 62% of companies stated this as the key reason followed by 26% suggesting it was down to third-party failings and 12% stating it was unavoidable internal failures.

However, the typical senior executive is not keen to engage in Digital Governance discussions, about problems related to the internet and technology, has led to them being exposed to receiving poor service from their providers. When executives do ask questions internally there is often a lack of clarity about who is responsible for the organisation’s web activities – whether it is internal individuals or the external agency that built the site.

The reality is that Sitemorse has run many website testing surveys on the UK and global retail sectors, the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 indices, and UK and US government sites over a period of 10 years and has continued to find the most basic errors occurring on the majority of these websites. The myriad of problems encountered include the likes of draft versions of annual reports being accidentally posted online, investor relations email contacts not working, presentations missing, and claims about compliance that are simply wrong.

Unfortunately, this scenario is not unusual and there are many hundreds of other companies in the same position. Whereas a few websites operate without any function, performance and compliance problems and are well managed, at the other end of the scale there are many other examples where the scale of the problems need addressing.

Senior management teams are being let down badly from the insufficient levels of transparency between their companies and their web providers. The real issue is that the job of measuring and monitoring websites’ is given directly to the suppliers themselves so they are effectively judging and critiquing their own work. This is clearly a conflict of interest - is this where independent assessment and reporting on Digital Governance becomes a clear need?

While it is not recommended that the chief executive should check every web page, there has to be compliance undertaken that is independent and which continually validates and monitors websites to a sufficiently robust standard that it can stand up to an aggressive defence from the Digital providers and their attempts to sometimes mystify executives with complex jargon / technical details.

Organisations have KPIs for most aspects of their businesses that enable management to make accurate assessments but there are no such standards in place for measuring the basic operation of the websites in most corporations.

This has to change because it is simply unacceptable for businesses to continue to rely or entrust such an increasingly valuable medium as the internet to an external supplier because inevitably it may not be in the interests of this third-party to be as thorough as they should be. And it is inevitably the retailer and their customers that suffer most from this unfortunate scenario.