Web Compliance

We at Vamosa recently conducted a survey of UK and US private and public sector organizations to uncover: who is responsible for websites; what is involved in the day-to-day management of websites; and how website performance is measured. Over 100 webmasters, IT project managers and web marketing staff completed the survey.

The results provided us with some valuable insights into web operations management, focused on the very real day-to-day challenges.

The survey clearly showed that the web team is inundated with a variety of requests and projects. They are most commonly tasked with publishing content - 90% of respondents handling such requests. Fixing broken links is also a major issue for the web team, with 84% dealing with link cohesion problems. Implementing and maintaining technical standards, such as web accessibility, were also dealt with by 71% of respondents. Finally, ensuring SEO performance was optimized was carried out by web teams approximately two-thirds of the time – in fact SEO and general site performance were the most frequently logged requests that the web team had to deal with.

In addition to the tasks highlighted above, the survey also found that the majority of web maintenance and management is carried out in house, not handled by external agencies. A third of all web teams stated that they were responsible for between 76% and 90% of all task requests while another third of respondents said that their web team was fully responsible for all tasks.  When you consider the daily demands that Web teams are faced with, it is clear that teams need to be efficient in fixing errors before they get out of control.

Vamosa has introduced WebWorxx to put web teams in the driving seat by completing daily crawls of websites. ‘Hotspots’ on the homescreen show where the most common issues on your website are occurring and places them in rank order.  The web operation teams can then create specific ‘focus areas’ designed to address a particular sub-set of the problems identified. Work can then be assigned as a project to team members, to work through the tasks and resolve problems. Notes can be captured against tasks and even marked up on the page where the error occurs - all within the WebWorxx collaborative portal. This means everyone is fully aware of the status of assigned tasks at all times.

WebWorxx monitors web properties against a configurable list of policies, dependent on your specific requirements. These policies incorporate a range of typical web operations issues such as:
•    Accessibility (26 Policies)
•    Search Engine Optimization (10 Policies)
•    Brand Compliance (8 Policies)
•    Governance (4 Policies)
•    Data Protection (7 Policies)
•    HTML Standards (2 Policies)

Web teams are clearly under time pressure to complete a wide variety of tasks efficiently and effectively. WebWorxx allows proactive management of day-to-day requirements of web operations management putting the web team back in control.











To find out more about how WebWorxx can support the day-to-day management of your website visit: WebWorxx or download the free 14 day WebWorxx trial now.

When technology provides a revolution in service delivery, unfortunately there inevitably comes a point in the adoption curve when the service provider ceases to perceive the technology as being ground-breaking, and it becomes viewed as a burden or overhead.   The initial competitive advantage becomes a distant memory.  Take, for example, the humble ATM.  Twenty-five years ago, ATMs were innovation supreme.  They delivered 24/7 services to bank customers and allowed banks to significantly reduce the cost per transaction of dealing with customers.  Move forward to the new millennium and the banks started to introduce invidious charges for using the very same machines that had allowed them to become so efficient in the first place.  The ATM becomes a mode of operation rather than a differentiator, a profit center rather than a cost center.

In the second decade of the 21st century we see far more ubiquity in the web – Google trawls trillions of web pages and there are hundreds of millions of websites.  Corporations recognize that their web presence opens up markets at a speed and a rate previously undreamt of.  However, there is a downside to this rush-to-web.  As websites become bigger, more innovative and more technology laden, understanding the real web experience of the online customer becomes a huge challenge for organizations; website governance is now essential.  And the innovative aspects are becoming a dim and distant memory – single point of publication, world wide reach etc.
 
The aspect of the web that is so attractive is also the aspect that makes it so dangerous.  With a frictionless market for information, and a ready audience of consumers, your customers now find that they have teeth.  If the web experience is poor, or if a broken link prevents them from making a purchase, or if a pressure group spots the tiniest chink in your accessibility armor, then countless blogs and forum comments and YouTube videos can appear (in many instances even before the offending company knows that it has sinned!).

From the government agency which has to ensure that all citizens have access to all services online regardless of disability, to the online retailer with a hugely complex content supply chain, there are a huge number of ‘micro-measurements’ that must be applied to every page on every website; then every changed page needs to have this all-seeing review applied as apart of a web operations management strategy.  The numbers can make your head hurt – checking thousands of web pages every day for dozens of mini-flaws is a thankless task, but it is becoming a more and more essential one as the importance of web compliance increases.  To invest tens of millions of dollars into your website, your marketing strategy, your corporate brand, and then provide a second rate customer experience smacks of bad luck if you are charitable; amateurism if you are being realistic.

To find out how you can get back control of your site, so your customers can get a truly impressive web experience every time, checkout the latest WebWorxx video.

The daily challenges associated with managing a website and its content are vast and hugely varied. A diverse range of people contribute to a corporate site: not only those traditionally responsible for web content such as web developers, webmasters, web authors, digital marketing managers and marketing managers, but also occasional contributors such as web authors and many varying members of IT .

This complex network of individuals inputting content and managing web assets or performance inevitably leads to errors  such as duplicate content, broken links, incorrect tagging and content that is difficult to find.
WebWorxx allows web teams to organize and execute web projects more effectively to improve transparency and productivity. As WebWorxx is a collaborative tool, the user responsible for web content compliance, for example, can generate work packages and delegate specific issues to content owners who can then be tasked with resolving them.

To see how WebWorxx can help you overcome the many issues associated with web operations management, we’re currently offering a free 14-day free trial. To find out more visit http://www.vamosa.com/webworxx-c121.

We are excited to announce the launch of a 14-day trial of WebWorxx to give those responsible for web content compliance a view of how this can be easily managed day-to-day.

The 14-day trial is available now and all users need to do is enter some quick details and the link to the website they would like to monitor.

WebWorxx will then get to work on crawling the website content and analyze the performance based on set policy areas including accessibility, brand compliance, search engine optimization, links cohesion, HTML and language.

Within 2hrs the portal will generate a report that is emailed to the user who will be invited to log into the account to view the results. A member of the Vamosa WebWorxx team will be in touch to talk through the findings and advise on next steps.

As WebWorxx is a collaborative tool, the user responsible for web content compliance can generate work packages and delegate the content owners to resolve any issues found. As an ‘out of the box’ solution it is set up with 63 policies but the client has control of these and can turn off whichever ones are not relevant.

We’ve already had 50 users download the trial so try it for yourself and see how WebWorxx can simplify managing website content and optimization.

To find out more visit http://www.vamosa.com/webworxx-c121

On any given day a web operations team can be inundated with requests to change this web page, add this link, ensure the back-end is updated to reflect various changes. The queue of problems stacks up from these requests, but also because many people contribute to a site, so content can be incorrect, duplicated, tagged incorrectly and therefore not findable. Even the smallest inaccuracy or inconsistency in a regulated environment can result in untold problems with major financial implications. Business opportunities may be missed, sales lost and legal liabilities created by published or user-generated content which simply fails to follow the correct policy.

Ensuring that every single piece of content adheres to the content compliance policies and standards of your brand is a 24/7 process that no one can afford to fail. It requires automated software.

Last week we announced our new software tool dedicated to helping web operations teams deliver value for the business, but what does that really mean? Essentially it provides an integrated platform for managing and governing web operation projects. To manage the digital haystack, this tool provides full visibility of any issues on a daily basis to identify problem areas and address these with the relevant people quickly. It can help the web team identify policies and procedures that need to be introduced to minimize ongoing web issues.  It’s an easy-to-use interface dedicated to improving the performance of web operations teams and therefore the effectiveness of a company’s web properties.

If you are a Web developer, Webmaster, Web author, Digital Marketing Manager or Marketing Manager, you can increase both your own and the wider team’s productivity by using this dashboard product. You’ll find that your time is freed up to initiate more strategic web development projects.

Fifteen years ago having a website wasn’t mission-critical for an organization. Now there isn’t an enterprise that exists without one. The Web has fundamentally changed the way organizations operate. From its simple beginnings, the use of the Web now extends from public-facing Internet sites to knowledge-sharing, employee-focused Intranets, partner-oriented, limited-access Extranets, and the newer collaborative domain of social media. As the Web function continues to broaden, managing it becomes more difficult. The need for Web Governance is now essential.

The same management accountability mechanisms and controls that support and govern other aspects of business also need to be viewed as mission-critical. To align the Web with strategic objectives, formal Web Governance must be established and mechanisms to enforce standards must be incorporated into day-to-day Web operations management.

Taking a few steps back, Web Governance is the authoritative administrative structure that sets policy and standards for Web product management. But what does that mean? Simply put, every enterprise must have a set of policies for their Website. These policies refer to the way people make decisions about the organizational Web presence. They determine who gets to sit around the table when those decisions are made and who has the final decision-making authority when consensus cannot be achieved through discussion.

A Web Governance framework will help minimize and settle internal Web site ownership disputes. It can also smooth the relationship among marketing communications, IT, and various departmental Web stakeholders. This stability turns the focus to managing Web sites instead of arguing about them.

Formal Web Governance allows individuals to understand their role as it relates to Web decision-making, policy creation and standards enforcement. It reduces the potential for silos, stalemates, and disputes and enables collaboration by setting the foundation for efficient execution of Web projects and initiatives. As a result, it also reduces redundant efforts and technology misalignment.

Enforcement begins with the definition of a full range of standards followed by dissemination to all stakeholders, careful implementation and finally, measuring for compliance. For more information download our white paper or view these videos.

Download our Web Governance and Standards Compliance White Paper to understand the importance of incorporating mechanisms into your day to day web operations management strategy to allow your organization to measure web governance and compliance standards.

W3C, WCAG, Section 508, Double-A, XHTML Strict, Dublin Core, EDRM, ISO 9000… if you have a role in managing compliance within your organization – particularly as it relates to delivery of web content for internal or public consumption – chances are high that at least some of these terms are familiar to you. As argued in recent Vamosa blog posts from Moayyed Darugar and Paul Henderson, companies have a legal or ethical obligation to maintain compliance with some accepted standards, which all basically boil down to making sure the right information is disclosed and making sure that disclosed information is accessible. The software tools marketplace abounds with point solutions addressing compliance issues in each of these categories. But in addition to the universal standards, it’s likely that your organization has its own policies and protocols with their own set of motivations. What is your technology doing to address these?

It’s quite likely that your organization has many guidelines and procedures for managing your web and document content which are not reinforced by the technologies used to do that management. If you do have tools in place to address these focused objectives, it’s likely that they are integrated clumsily into your CMS or disjointed entirely… a cobblestone of macros. Even worse, some of the bricks in your road to compliance may be feature-rich applications from which you only need one or two functions; expensive bricks indeed! Taking a blue-sky view of the problem, it should be evident that the way to effectively manage your content’s compliance to both good-corporate-citizen standards and company-specific policies is to do so from a unified console giving you a view of exactly the policies you want to manage, and only those.

In the enterprise, there’s no such thing as a technology problem. There are only business problems to be solved with technology. This means that for a technical solution to be viable, its design, deployment, and usage must be fully aligned with the business issue it addresses. Producing this kind of solution is virtually impossible for a traditional software manufacturer: a precisely targeted solution limits the market, and a generic solution is bloatware that no one wants.  Building a tailor made solution, based on a standard software platform however, is exactly what has established Vamosa as a leader in Enterprise Content Governance. By offering a rules-based engine, Vamosa allows organizations to build robust, custom  solutions to govern compliance to their specific standards, with help on hand from the Vamosa Expert Services Team.

Whether you’re suffering blemishes on your corporate façade or fissures in the foundation of your business Vamosa offers a flexible solution.

Knowing how to turn the contents of your digital landfill into a knowledge asset presents a huge challenge for any business. In today’s world, most organizations do not realize the actual volume of data living and breathing on their corporate web properties, document management systems and file shares; it is estimated that around 80% of corporate data exists in unstructured forms. There are however a number of steps that can be taken in order to capture, share and retain that knowledge, allowing you to build business advantage.

1) Define Knowledge and Deliver it

In order for companies to create a competitive business advantage it is essential that they have content knowledge, as this is the building blocks for differentiation. To obtain the most relevant information from your content stores you must first define what knowledge is. Knowledge must be up to date, relevant and map onto your prime business objectives. It also must be aligned with the mode of operation of your business; in a distributed, technologically advanced enterprise, there is often no need to produce paper-based information, with all the associated challenges of change control, and inherent costs. Within more traditional, slower moving environments the use of electronic media alone may involve a level of culture change that is unnecessary due to the prevalence of paper based manuals, such as in field based applications of within engineering workshops.  The reality is that knowledge should be independent from the channel through which it is delivered. It should be fit for purpose, and ideally operate across all communications channels within the business.

2) Adopt Industry Standard Classification Schemes where Possible

Now that the knowledge has been defined it is essential that it is understood how value will be extracted from it. To achieve this, a flexible classification process is required. You should identify all business content within your company and then associate those pieces with an industry or corporate standard classification, thus creating a data map to valuable knowledge.

3) Embrace Long-Term Standards

Industry-wide standard object based classification will provide your business with a flexible organizational solution. If there is organizational change, you can modify your content taxonomy (that is, change the way in which the relationships exist between the objects) rather than having to physically re-classify every object to reflect the changed taxonomic requirements of your organization.  This will help to ensure the knowledge assets are of use and will continue to be valuable going forward as the business changes.

4) Apply Consistency to Your Existing Content to Reduce the Noise

Inconsistent nomenclature, patchy classification, duplicate and near duplicate content creates a significant amount of static noise within your organisations proper information. This noise makes it hard to find anything – normally because you don’t have the tools or techniques to pinpoint a relevant subject area, or because your information is stored in functional silos – in department-specific storage areas, for example.  It is therefore important to reduce the noise within your organization by applying standard classification to your existing content and ensure content compliance standards are in place.










Get to grips with your organization's 'digital landfill', by discovering the five steps to achieving insight into all of your unstructured content, including information on usage, metadata management and storage. Find out what you need to know to make your content management system truly effective.

When creating or authoring content one important factor that is often overlooked by authors is correctly tagging the content. Perhaps this is a result of authors misunderstanding what is meant by tagging content properly.

There are two main approaches to tagging content; top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach has been with us for a long time, even before the invention of the Web and is still used extensively today with Web content. The top down approach tends to be more hierarchical and involves the use of a taxonomy. The bottom-up approach is however much less structured and allows for the tagging of content by the author without limiting them to a specific set of terms to describe the content. This form of tagging content has proven to be very popular in the Social Media sites such as Twitter, Flickr and delicious.

The hierarchical top-down tagging approach tends to be used for enterprise content, where audit requirements for regulatory compliance are more onerous. Corporate, Industry and Government taxonomies are increasingly being used within implementations of Content and Information Management Systems. Taxonomies are used to classify and help in the retrieval of unstructured data within the organization. The taxonomy, if designed correctly, should help to create a map of the content. The main benefit of this, over the bottom-up approach, is  it allows users to find the relevant information quickly. Taxonomies achieve this by supporting the broadening and narrowing of topics, which allows users who are not sure what information they require to zero in on the information relevant to them.

We can see, therefore, that it is important to tag content correctly as this allows for effective and efficient retrieval of information. The problem that exists within many organizations is that there is a slew of digital content published across hard drives, intranets and CMSs that is not tagged correctly and this volume of content is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. Often, organizations  have a well designed taxonomy but authors are either not using it at all or are not using it correctly, leading to content being hard to find, content being created multiple times resulting in unreliable information being found.

In order to combat this all too frequent enterprise failing, it is essential that content is not only tagged but that it is tagged correctly to ensure that when content is found it is relevant and of use to the person requesting the information. To ensure that content is not only tagged correctly at source but that it also conforms to all of the other corporate standards, an Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) strategy should be implemented. Many organizations are currently considering a move to SharePoint 2010, which has limited support for enterprise-level taxonomies and organizations may want to consider solutions to control; tagging standards at the desktop as part of their project implementation.

Through truly effective Enterprise Content Governance – businesses can optimize their existing investment in enterprise content management systems through proper control of content, while reducing costs, improving corporate efficiency.

We recently worked with 451 Group  to host a webinar focused on Information Governance. During that webinar, we looked at what information governance is and why it is important to an organization and its content management system (CMS).

I remember a research paper from 451 Group called ‘Unstructured Information or Unstructured Content: the elephant in the corner’. People were starting to flag up the fact that content is amassing within businesses day by day. And not every single piece of content is necessarily under control.

Content governance is about a frame of mind within an organization. It’s also about real life implementation of that governance to ensure that published content is consumed by stakeholders and then controlled as it needs to be. We see content governance as being driven by risk mitigation. Obviously there are legal and industry regulations, compliance challenges, cost control and also the drive to make information findable for knowledge workers. But there isn’t always the drive towards reducing content. Metadata and some tracking capability won’t always optimize what you have.

We talk about ‘quality built in’. It’s about the fact that each and every piece of content has to have some structure built in to ensure it can be controlled under ILM processes. We see the main challenges to governing content as web content and social media.

During the webinar, Kathleen Reidy, Senior Analyst at The 451 Group said that Information Governance is knowing what content exists, where it is located, how long it will be kept, who will have access to it – and then how to ensure it is protected and that policies and standards are used and enforced. She also said that businesses need more intelligence about this content, to decide what happens to the data. Is it a record? Does it go into the archive; does it get deleted? A lot of organizations still say “our users are the best ones to decide.” And that’s certainly true. But you will find more organizations that want a technology safeguard behind that; to ensure retention even when nobody has declared the data as a record. And then how do you make sure that policy continues to be enforced over time? Certainly technology has a role to play there as well.

With Vamosa technology, we can identify the value of content ranging from documents to web pages, where it is located and automatically clean it up, but then govern it. Doing this enables organizations to gain the value from content that they should.

We say to our customers that content management doesn’t always mean content governance. Content governance can be implemented without content management, and more often than not, content management is implemented without content governance. But they do make very good partners. A good content management system is made even better by implementing successful and effective content governance.

Download the transcribed webinar whitepaper here.

The boardroom is a busy place with every department competing for resource and time from the decision makers. But often, content is not discussed or not a priority for the board. However increasingly, these decision makers are on the hook for the content stored within their company, or that appears on their Web properties; whether or not anyone in the company created it or even knew about it.

The need for businesses to protect costs and competitive edge has never been greater. That’s why now is the time for organizations to control and structure their content properly across the enterprise and for the board to recognize the benefits for the business and its agenda.

Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) is central to businesses optimizing their existing investment in enterprise content management systems, while reducing costs, improving corporate efficiency, ensuring compliance and reducing their carbon footprint. More specifically, ECoG addresses the following board-level issues:

• eDiscovery - Effective ECoG lowers the risk of being unprepared, and ensures that access to electronic content doesn’t end up being extremely costly.

• Brand Governance – Brand compliance is hugely important for today’s globalized organizations to ensure their competitive messages are consistently communicated to key (and often geographically distributed) communities of interest.

• Reduced Storage – Burgeoning content and the constraints of compliance are inevitably going to have an impact on storage. And while the unit cost of storage is starting to decrease and technologies such as virtualization are coming to maturity, more work can be done to reduce the amount of storage a business uses. In the process of migrating over 100 organizations from one Content Management System to another, Vamosa has found that as much as 50% of an organization’s content is typically redundant. Remove this content, and 50% of a company’s server farm can be freed up, offering a huge saving on operating costs.

• Corporate efficiency – And there are more significant, farther-reaching benefits to be had from effective ECoG. ‘Collaborative working’ and ‘knowledge management’ may be industry buzzwords, but the concepts they represent should be taken seriously by every organization. The ability for a company to capture, share, organize, find and use its knowledge efficiently has a direct impact on its ability to be productive, competitive and ultimately, profitable – yet not all organizations are properly equipped to do this.

To be able to control and structure content properly across the organization – i.e., to achieve effective Enterprise Content Governance – organizations need to improve their content quality. The board needs to understand this importance and put proper resource into achieving effective ECoG. To learn about the five significant steps in the process, download the whitepaper here.

Over the last 15 years, the Web has fundamentally changed the way organizations conduct their business. From its simple beginnings, the use of the Web now extends from public-facing Internet sites to knowledge-sharing Intranets, limited-access Extranets, and the ever expanding world of social media. As the Web function continues to broaden, it requires the same management accountability mechanisms and controls that support and govern other aspects of business.

The notion of corporate governance is not new. Many organizations have formal governance controlling core functions such as IT and finance. However at Vamosa we have found that over one third of enterprises have no web governance policy or inconsistent policies on legal and technical compliance for web content.

Some view web governance as a barrier to freeform, organic Web development that has helped the Web move from a curiosity to a mission-critical business tool. However, there is now a mass of uncontrolled data available on the Web and this unstructured growth and lack of governance standards creates risk as the Web presence degrades amidst a cacophony of un-orchestrated development practices.

We agree with Lisa Welchman that the Web is simply too mission-critical to operate in an ad hoc or informal manner. In order to effectively align the Web with strategic objectives, Lisa is a proponent of formal Web Governance must be established and mechanisms implemented to enforce standards must be incorporated into day-to-day web operations management.

At Vamosa we believe it is time for Web Governance; Now and to demonstrate its importance, we will be running a series of weekly videos on this issue.



Web Governance Part, Now! Part 1




Web Governance, Now! Part 2

Check out more on this in our white paper Web Governance and Standards Compliance.
 

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In Part 1 of this series, we highlighted the hidden challenges of merging digital content in the context of an acquisition. Acquired content often undercuts unsuspecting organizations by delivering blows across a range of exposed areas: from the content itself, to the technology on which it is served, to its audience – whether employees or customers. In this issue, we explore some of the solutions Vamosa provides to help organizations overcome these integration challenges and achieve their acquisition objectives.

Branding of Acquired Properties

The most obvious way in which acquired content negatively impacts an organization is by eroding its corporate identity. This is most apparent in the case of branding assets: logos, color palettes, and font choices, but many more signals of incomplete integration lurk below the surface. These signals may be acute but unobtrusive – contact email addresses pointing to pre-acquisition domains, obsolete product names – or subtly pervasive – material at sharply different reading levels, non-compliance with adopted accessibility and web standards. Through a combination of services and technology, Vamosa allows organizations to close the brand gap and ensure brand governance standards are adhered to. Taking advantage of Vamosa’s policy-driven rules engine, our Consultancy practice can design and configure a tailored package of content policies using Vamosa's ECoG Suite for Web, precisely targeting an organization’s most pressing content issues.

System Consolidation

It’s easy for companies to make a connection between public content and sales, but the burden of supporting post-acquisition content has deep implications for costs as well. While there are clear – and important – differences between content management systems, all are designed to facilitate the flow of information in a collaborative environment. That’s fine as a concept using one CMS but when you have multiple Content Management Systems – be careful, it can actual restrict collaboration. Reducing the number of content management systems required by the combined organization benefits both production and consumption; at a business level, this translates into elimination of sources of waste: licensing fees, hardware, lines of application code. Vamosa’s ECoG Suite for Web – with or without the deployment of our Consulting practice – allows organizations to accurately size their potential savings through systems consolidation, and then achieve them through migration into a unified platform. When decommissioning systems is not an option, Vamosa’s ECoG Suite for Web can apply metadata dimensions to content in place, enabling portal integration to make content findable or push it directly to relevant consumers.

Users of Content – Enabling Access

Lastly, acquisitions yield major challenges for the users of content. In the context of restructuring a company, it’s common for content ownership to change as departments are split and merged, and much of the content itself – internal HR documents, mission statements, functional group sites – is likely to become redundant or irrelevant. At an access level, reorganization manifests itself in changes to security groups. People often focus on security’s role in preventing information from getting into the wrong hands, but it’s just as important to ensure that new employees are quickly granted access to company information; neglecting this basic privilege is likely to precipitate a morale nosedive. Vamosa’s family of products and services allow business to quickly identify and eliminate swaths of redundant content while at the same time updating links to point to their corresponding active pages. Additionally, Vamosa’s ability to reassign content to new owners or groups ensures that information is editable by and available to the proper channels, breaking down barriers to collaboration and empowering an organization to be greater than the sum of its parts.








To learn more about CMS consolidation and CMS Migration, down the Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success White Paper.

As I explained in my last post, having an effective information and content governance strategy is key to achieving compliance. However, implementing this strategy requires careful thought and planning.

Challenges of Governance

Today’s web content landscape presents further challenges for organizations’ attempts to implement a governance model.  With the wholesale adoption of social network software and the implementation of web 2.0 standards, the web operations management team is overwhelmed with attempts to maintain even a modicum of control.

With content being derived from multiple sources and external feeds as well as the tremendous increase in end user contributions, through social networking software such as instant messaging, blogs, corporate intranets etc it is virtually impossible to enforce corporate governance standards at the point of content creation.  Similarly, the slow adoption of storage and access standards such as JCR and CMIS present governance challenges due to the dynamic nature of the content being published and the lack of capability for demonstrating what was actually being published at a specific point in time.

All of these challenges mean that the only true point of review for web governance standards is at the point of consumption, at which point the complex composite content is actually rendered.  However, the sheer scale of monitoring hundreds of thousands of pieces of web content against dozens, if not hundreds, of standards (covering accessibility, brand and regulatory compliance as well as findability and search engine optimization requirements) means that the web operations team often cannot address the issue.  So now  the scale of the task is becoming clear. The good news for web operations however is that there are new generations of online monitoring applications that specifically address the complex requirements of web content governance. How does this work?

Who has Control of Content?

Well the first step is to establish who has control of content within the organization. Is it the marketing and communications team, the web department, or the IT department (or a combination)? Ideally everybody within these functions of the business should be involved in the decision-making process when implementing new policies and standards for compliance, not just management. By including these departments in the process you will help to ensure a better understanding: each person will know what the standards and policies are, which department is responsible for what and what their individual contribution is. This collaboration between brand managers, web authors and IT staff, will ensure that governance is both achieved and, equally importantly, maintained.

Who is Responsible?

When setting new policies and standards for governance, companies need to be aware of and sensitive to the impact on their employees’ job roles, which will change, as highlighted by Lisa Welchman, co-founder of consultancy firm WelchmanPierpoint.  For instance, it may now become the responsibility of the web author to ensure governance and content quality (through the use of an automated process), rather than the IT manager; a different job than that which is outlined in their contract.

It is essential that enterprises are aware that governance does not only apply to internal documents or content on their website; rather that it needs to be applied to their entire web presence.  Any content published on the web needs to be governed. In today’s digital world and with social media becoming an increasingly important communications tool, it is essential that content is monitored and its quality maintained.

To learn more about implementing an Information Governance Strategy, download the Web Governance and Standards Compliance White Paper.

At Vamosa, we’ve recently commissioned research to look into enterprises’ website governance policy. The results were not good. Over one third of enterprises have no web governance policy or inconsistent policies on legal and technical web compliance for web content. The research also showed that 4% of enterprises never check content for legal compliance. Basically, there are a lot of enterprises out there that are completely open to eDiscovery cost implications or other legal issues.

And the costs are real. The US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), eDiscovery laws, force companies in litigation to present a whole array of electronic evidence data to lawyers, from email to instant messaging chats and accounting databases. Yet companies are struggling to do this – and are paying hefty fines as a result. Failure to comply with FRCP data discovery demands in litigation cost financial services firm UBS Warburg $29 million. Pharmaceutical company Merck, meanwhile, was forced to hand over an astounding $253 million for the same reasons. In fact, a well-known international fast food company allegedly spends $100,000 dollars in fines every day because it cannot respond with the right information in time. These costs are real, and extremely damaging. Enterprises are not encouraging proper governance of content and as a result are putting themselves at risk.

Having said all this, legal compliance and the fear of litigation in case of compliance failure is driving the growth of the Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) market. This is a good thing as more enterprises need control over their web content and effective ECoG will make it a reality.  ECoG will help enterprises not only achieve, but maintain good content quality to satisfy these key business challenges that are reliant on content.









Check out more on this in our white paper ‘Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality’.

At Vamosa, we define ‘Information Governance’ as the set of policies and procedures designed to govern a piece of information from its inception through to its destruction. Information governance activities include: the design and implementation of formal policies that define how information is stored and shared among employees and stakeholders; addressing preventable risks to sensitive information; better preparing for new compliance mandates; ensuring quality, compliance and protection of information; and increasing the business value of information.

The 451 Group’s article ‘The Rise of Information Governance’ (August 2009) similarly defines ‘Information Governance’ as the practices and technologies involved with proactively managing what information is retained, where it is stored and for how long, who has access to it and how it is protected.

Information Governance

Whatever the definition, ‘Information Governance’ needs to be a priority and included as part of enterprises’ wider compliance strategy i.e. regulatory compliance – national or industry-specific compliance mandates – technical compliance, for example, Web accessibility; and compliance with corporate policy, such as brand guidelines, recruitment practices and so on. One of the significant challenges is translating these ‘Information Governance’ policies into day-to-day behavior, particularly when it comes to unstructured data.

Managing unstructured data (web content, email, Blogs, user-generated content) is inherently different, and in many ways more challenging, than controlling its structured counterpart. This is why we have coined the phrase ‘Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) to focus attention on this often uncontrolled ‘digital landfill’ as AIIM would have it.’ Effective Information Governance is impossible without controlling and structuring your content and that’s exactly what ECoG does for organizations.

Enterprise Content Governance

Enterprise Content Governance is the act of ensuring your content is structured and controlled; it’s the process of not only achieving, but maintaining good content ‘quality’ in order to satisfy key business challenges. This is where our definition and the process of ‘Information Governance’ differs slightly from 451 Group. Being compliant doesn’t just mean you’ve proactively managed content, but that you’ve controlled and structured that content from its inception and then monitored and maintained it throughout its lifecycle so that you can truly stand by its quality.

To learn how to start to get a grip on the uncontrolled data in your organization and implement policies to keep it under control, download the Rise of Information Governance White Paper.