Policy Design in the Age of Digital Adoption

Ricardo Ferreira

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781801816861
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Networking
• Index: Computer Science

A proven methodology to build a PolicyOps function and public policy design frameworks for digital adoption, supporting your organization's journey into new paradigms and service models such as Cloud, SaaS, CaaS, FaaS, and DevOpsKey Features• Understand and define policies that can be consumed across the business• Leverage a framework to embed Policy as Code into the organization• Learn how to use Open Policy Agent and its powerful policy language, RegoBook DescriptionPolicy as Code (PaC) is a powerful paradigm that enables organizations to implement, validate, and measure policies at scale. Policy Design in the Age of Digital Adoption is a comprehensive guide to understanding policies, their design, and implementation for cloud environments using a DevOps-based framework. You'll discover how to create the necessary automation, its integration, and which stakeholders to involve.Complete with essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book will help you understand policies and how new technologies such as cloud, microservices, and serverless leverage Policy as Code. You'll work with a custom framework to implement PaC in the organization, and advance to integrating policies, guidelines, and regulations into code to enhance the security and resilience posture of the organization. You'll also examine existing tools, evaluate them, and learn a framework to implement PaC so that technical and business teams can collaborate more effectively.By the end of this book, you'll have gained the confidence to design digital policies across your organizational environment.What you will learn• Understand policies, guidelines, regulations and how they fit together in an organization• Discover policy-related current challenges brought by digital transformation regarding policies• Find out about Open Policy Engine (OPA) and other policy engines for different environments• Get to grips with the latest developments in PaC through a review of the literature, toolset, and usage• Explore the PaC framework to develop trust at scale, leveraging patterns and best practices• Become familiar with tool evaluation and selection using real-world examplesWho this book is forFrom decision-makers, such as chief information officers (CIOs) and chief information security officers (CISOs) responsible for affecting change horizontally in an organization, to cloud and DevOps architects and engineers, this book will help professionals involved in designing, implementing, and measuring policies in their organizations. A basic understanding of concepts such as cloud-native technologies, Infrastructure as Code, DevOps, and automation is necessary to get started with this book.

Section 1: Foundation

In this section, you will understand the why and the what of policies, current challenges organizations face, and what is needed to make Policy as Code a reality in an organization.

This section contains the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Introduction to the Policy Design
• Chapter 2, Operationalizing Policy for Highly Regulated Industries
• Chapter 3, Policy as Code as a Business Enabler

Chapter 1: Introduction to Policy Design

This chapter starts the journey of understanding policies, their use, their importance, and how they are effectively used.

This chapter discusses the foundation of policy design, what constitutes a policy, how it is sketched together, and why policies are used. We will discuss design theory and how to create sound policies while demonstrating the most common instruments used to develop policies and their life cycles.

Once these elements are established, parallels from public policy to the digital organizational context later in the book will be more straightforward, as well as understanding how policies can help organizations in their digital journey by enabling faster digital adoption across the organization.

By the end of this chapter, you will understand how the field of public policy and associated tools can be transposed for digital adoption in an organization. This is typically achieved by a layer of governance that encompasses people, processes, and technology by creating coherent policies using persuasive system design (PSD), nudging, and incentives for more effective digital governance.

In summary, this chapter highlights how the field of policy design can be used to create a proactive governance model that goes way beyond enforcing and authorization, to increase digital adoption throughout an organization.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

• The why, what, and how of policies
• From design theory to policy implementation
• Policy design – key issues, tools, designs over time, effectiveness
• The business value of digital policies

The why, what, and how of policies

Let's look at a definition for policy. Cambridge Dictionary states the following: "A set of ideas or a plan of what to do in particular situations that has been agreed to officially by a group of people, a business organization, a government, or a political party." If we summarized it in a few words, it would be a set of guidelines to gain a positive outcome.

In our world, we live and abide by policies implemented by the government, our work environment (by our corporate policy), and our daily lives, for example, by an individual policy (such as a healthcare plan).

This section will discuss why policies are essential, especially in the globalized world we live in, and what business benefits we can derive by implementing and using them.

We will discuss the elements of a policy and show how the different elements can be combined to achieve a goal. You will also realize the pervasive nature of policies, how governments use public policies, how organizations implement corporate policies, and even the use of artificial intelligence in some algorithms, such as reinforced learning.

Why policies

Let's look at an example of a health policy enacted by the EU to reduce smoking and premature deaths.

Tobacco consumption is the single largest avoidable health risk and the most significant cause of premature death in the EU, responsible for nearly 700,000 deaths every year. Around 50% of smokers die prematurely (on average 14 years earlier).

Despite considerable progress made in recent years, the number of smokers in the EU is still high – 26% of the overall population and 29% of young Europeans aged 15-24 smoke.

The complete policy can be consulted at https://ec.europa.eu/health/tobacco/overview_en.

The initial paragraph unpacks the why. The program's objectives are to protect its citizens from dying prematurely. The overarching goal is health.

Another example from the EU is education policies, for example, the European policy cooperation (ET 2020 framework), which is a strategic framework for cooperation in education and training (ET 2020). This and other education policies can be accessed here: https://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/about-education-policies_ka.

The policy goals are to develop education programs to tackle skills, aging societies, and technological developments.

These policies have laid out their goals and the elements of what will be used (for example, publicity, regulation, and tax rules).

They can ensure compliance to a certain standard or streamline processes to provide a map for accepted behaviors. They can influence the desired outcome so that a specific positive goal is achieved. In sum, policies are everywhere in our day-to-day lives as they make up the basis of our society and a mechanism to influence positive results.

What is a policy?

As we saw previously, policies are designed to help an entity (governments, organizations, or groups) create guidelines to achieve a goal.

Suppose we follow the literature on the latest research in policy creation. In that case, the taxonomy in broad terms is divided into two main parts: the policy's goal, what we are trying to achieve, and policy tools, how we achieve those goals, which we will go into more detail about later.

Usually, the policy aim will involve establishing the following:

• The goal: What are the general ideas behind the policy?
• The objectives: What is the policy going to address?
• The setting: What are the environmental nuances where the policy is going to be applied?

Let's take the example of the tobacco health policy that we saw earlier.

The program's objectives would be to protect its citizens from the effects of tobacco and dissuade younger people from picking up the habit.

The goal would be linked to positive health and economic outcomes as well as a financial goal related to the prevention of disease, which left unchecked would lead to increased costs to national health systems.

The setting is related to how the EU operates regarding cross-border trading. The setting would consider the international cooperation and the usage of the European Anti-Fraud Office.

This example explains the components that go into the policy and their concerted usage for a specific goal.

The how of policies

As we have seen, a policy starts with an aim that needs to be well defined to create the goals, objectives, and settings. In this section, we will focus on how policies are created effectively by...

Table of contents

• Policy Design in the Age of Digital Adoption
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Foundation
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Policy Design
• Chapter 2: Operationalizing Policy for Highly Regulated Industries
• Chapter 3: Policy as Code a Business Enabler
• Section 2: Framework
• Chapter 4: Framework for Digital Policies
• Chapter 5: Policy for Cloud-Native Environments
• Chapter 6: Policy Design for Hybrid Environments
• Chapter 7: Building a Culture of PolicyOps
• Section 3: Tooling
• Chapter 8: Policy Engines
• Chapter 9: A Primer on Open Policy Agent
• Chapter 10: Policy as Code Tool Evaluation
• Chapter 11: Cloud Providers Policy Constructs
• Chapter 12: Integrating Policy as Code with Enterprise Workflows
• Chapter 13: Real-World Scenarios and Architectures
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