The Governance Gap: Preparing Professions for Digital Transformation

One of the most prevalent — and concerning — trends in the ongoing digital transformation of society is the way that complexity is weaponized to avoid accountability. Regardless, the public interest services that provide our most fundamental protections — systems such as health care, law and urban planning — are increasingly intermediated and heavily influenced by technology. What makes these particular professional services unique is that they are defined by existing — and legally enforceable — duties that require them to assume responsibility for protecting the individual and, ideally, collective interests of those they serve.

Duty-bearing professions have protections built into the way they perform their services,none of which are legally obviated by the ways those professionals use technology. The organizations responsible for preserving a field’s core integrities are typically non-governmental professional governance institutions that set norms, ethical rules and practice standards. To date, professional governance has been a largely unused avenue to governing digital rights or transformation in practice; yet, we argue, it represents an opportunity to catalyze accountability around the use of technology.

We focus on regulated, duty-bearing industries specifically to point to the triangulation that we identify as the governance gap.

The governance gap is the gap between the emergent realities of the (increasingly digital) practice of a regulated profession, the mechanisms for participation in the process of setting professional standards, and the education infrastructure to teach emergent professionals how to navigate both.

While a range of factors contribute to the governance gap, the point is that professions are designed to be learning ecosystems and professionals are neither trained to participate in them, nor are they supported to respond to emergent, practical realities such as digital transformation. While the governance gap is not created by digital transformation, the scale and scope of digital transformation of professional relationships are a generational adaptation challenge. The challenge of “keeping up” with digital transformation is not “to integrate these tools as rapidly as possible”; it is to secure the core integrity of professionals’ responsibilities in the context of a rapidly digitizing world. This challenge is going unaddressed by the institutions historically responsible for maintaining the integrity of duty-bound professional practice, not least because professional training programs fail to systematically train their students to participate in the governance of their own fields.

Our recommendations focus on the role of professional education programs — typically degree-granting training programs that equip students with the credentials to become a certified professional. Our argument is that bridging the gap between digitally transformed professional practice and professional governance will require training new professionals to do so. The governance gap frames not only a problem but an opportunity: a valuable potential surface for focused, politically aware intervention toward restoring core integrities to high-impact professions, relationships and services amid digital transformation.

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