The 2015 LITA (Library Information Technology Association) National Forum was kicked off with a keynote made by Lisa Welchman, president of Digital Governance Solutions. The first part of the keynote was an entertaining and personal reflection on how Ms. Welchman arrived at the position she has today and how those experiences prepared her for the world we now find ourselves in and its peculiar problems.
Ms. Welchman originally had dreams of being an opera singer, and her parents had their concerns about the reliability of that profession choice and made her learn to type. At university she dated someone for a time (the late '80s) who was studying computer science and he requested that she learn to use the Unix command line and the console-based email program Pine for corresponding with him. She asked for a gift of a Macintosh Plus from her grandfather (largely because of how it looked) and learned to use Hypercard to create a database of arias she knew how to sing.
These experiences prepared her to be a well-paid temp who could work on Lotus Notes development. Her experience with that led to an opportunity to work with the new company Netscape, which moved her to California, and that in turn landed her a job at Cisco working on their website in the late 90's (which she accidentally switched over to Japanese one day).
Life at Cisco, a company that was founded on computer networking and the Internet, showed her how badly people have managed to organize that which they put on the Internet, which nowadays is pretty much everything. She founded the company she runs today on the knowledge that if Cisco can't figure out how to properly organize and structure information for the Internet, there are a lot of people that can't and those people are in need of a company that specializes in assisting with this problem.
With this background established, Ms. Welchman proceeded to explain that although the Internet is new and different, in many ways it has commonalities with developments that have come before. These developments follow a pattern, including those who are threatened by a technology, dismiss it failing to recognize its inevitability, and are swept away as it is adopted. There are also those who have vision about what the technology might lead to, although they have a bit of a tendency to overestimate certain parts and underestimate others. What eventually happens is that the chaos that develops at the beginning of widespread adoption turns to a need for standards and regulation.
Ms. Welchman argued that rather than being restrictions that limit something's full potential, standards and restrictions focus a technology, allowing it to reach its full potential. Governance is the process of providing a framework that determines a strategy and policy to achieve standardization through the efforts of a team. That team itself a collaboration with different individuals at different levels. There is a core team that works on writing up policies and standards. That core team works closely with the people that are responsible for actually making stuff, the different liaisons that connect an organizations "siloed" departments with the rest of the team, and those vendors outside of an organization that are assisting the rest of the team.
Ms. Welchman defined what comprises policy and standards in a digital environment. Policy consists of high-level statements of beliefs, goals and objectives which are made to comply with laws, manage risk, or drive competitive advantage. Digital standards are the formal specifications that guide what is to be done in regards to various aspects of digital publication and development which can be divided into network and infrastructure, design, editorial, and publishing or development concerns.
I found this talk to be quite interesting and I enjoyed seeing the emphasis on establishing standards for information management, organization and presentation provided here, particularly coming from someone outside of the library field.
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