Web Governance

The Obama administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government with the purpose of ensuring public trust by establishing a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. This isn’t a blog to discuss the three points, rather to focus on the system of transparency.

Obama's Memorandum

Obama’s memorandum states:

Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

The Challenge for Government

The words ‘find’ and ‘use’ presents a challenge for government. The challenge is that Web content needs structure and control to allow findability and usability – which is provided by having a proper taxonomy and supporting metadata; but over time as more and more content is published its quality deteriorates because policies are not automated, and therefore not implemented,and the less structured and controlled content becomes.

The Directive establishes guidelines for each agency to launch an open government Web site that engages the public on how federal agencies can advance a more open agenda. And that Web site must also show the status of each agency’s efforts in adhering to the directive. But this means agencies have a lot of work cut out for them within a short period of time – 120 days to be exact.

It’s unlikely that all government agencies have a grasp of all the content that lives on their Web site, let alone the quality of it, how their brand is represented, what is findable and if it is compliant with government guidelines. Before work can be undertaken to even make government content more transparent, they need to solve this problem.

Enterprise Content Governance

This is exactly where Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) fits and why it is a necessity. ECoG is the act of ensuring content is structured and controlled and there are five significant steps each government agency must undertake to achieve Obama’s Open Government Directive and content governance.

•  Firstly, a Web content analysis must be undertaken to discover what content the agency has and where it is stored.
• Secondly, it must be enhanced to improve on the condition of the content
• Thirdly, it must be standardized to ensure content can be re-used
• Fourthly, it needs to be findable, by being located within the Information Architecture in a suitable repository
• And lastly, it needs to be monitored and maintained in real time against the organization’s quality policies to ensure the quality standards that have been established continue to be met

The Open Government Directive is definitely a step in the right direction to help improve the quality and effectiveness of Web content. But it needs to be done right, following a structured system so that agencies are fully compliant, but also for the American people to find, understand and use their government’s information.







To learn more about the steps required to implement an Enterprise Content Governance strategy download the Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality White Paper.