Web Operations Management

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.

Today, an organizations Website is usually the first point of contact that a customer has with a company. As such it is essential that your Website is as compelling as possible and people are not turned off it. In order to ensure your customers benefit from using your site, your content should be descriptive, readable, accessible and consistent.

However, ensuing Website governance and maintaining an error free web presence is a huge undertaking. Errors such as duplicate content being published, broken links and incorrect tagging are inevitable. It is essential that organizations can work quickly to rectify these issues before customers recognize them, which often result in missed sales, lost baskets and incomplete forms.

In order to ensure these concerns are dealt with promptly, collaboration within web operations teams is essential. Web teams should not have to be reliant on raising support tickets to find and fix errors, team members must be able to dedicate the right resource to fixing errors, allowing them to get on with more pertinent work and not continually struggle with technical emergencies.

WebWorxx allows web teams to gain control of their sites, by providing the information they require to proactively manage site performance. This not only allows their web estates to continuously improve but provides customers with a truly impressive web experience allowing you to convert visitors into sales.

To understand how WebWorxx can help give you back control of your Website and improve web operations management, download the free 14 day trail.

There is a growing rift between web teams over the issue of web accessibility. Three camps exist: those who believe accessibility is about disability, those who believe it is broader than that and those who really do not care either way. As normal, my position is I have a foot (big size 4) in two camps.

There is currently a virtual fistfight ensuing between numerous well-respected figures in the web operations and  accessibility communities that reflects the wider gulf emerging between those that design with and for the web.

The two positions taken are as follows:

Accessibility is about the disabled

Many believe that web accessibility is entirely about meeting the needs of disabled people. It is about helping those who have no control over how they access web sites because of some physical or cognitive disability. These developers and designers believe that if people choose to use incompatible software, whilst there are compatible options available, then this does not constitute an accessibility issue.

Accessibility is not just about the disabled

The other side of the argument is that accessibility is not "just" or even "primarily" about people with disabilities. Rather, it is about going to all reasonable lengths to ensure the widest possible access to information you provide on your site.

My size 4’s in two camps

If all you do is ensure your site runs in another browser in addition to Internet Explorer or ensure that colour-blind people can still read your copy then that has more value than all the endless theoretical debates in the world.

With fear and trepidation, I would like to wade into the middle of the debate by suggesting that the pragmatic and socially responsible approach lies somewhere in between.

Socially responsible

I believe that accessibility should be about more than meeting the needs of disabled users. It should certainly extend beyond the sometimes-limiting checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. and as such website governance standards are imperative.

I do not believe we can always expect users to upgrade or change their browser options simply because it is theoretically possible. As various members of web teams, we work with computers and browsers all the time. It is easy therefore to forget that the majority of people do not know how to upgrade their browsers or even change their default settings. In reality, many of them have trouble completing online forms! Even if they do, there are many environments where that option is unavailable to them such as in some corporate offices or in a public library where configuration is limited or non-existent.

Pragmatic

After saying all of that you have to draw the line somewhere. The real world of web operations management, with limited timescales and finite budgets, does not allow you to develop around every browser bug or accommodate every possible limitation. In the real world, you have to worry about return on investment. Is it worth 2 weeks work to get your site working successfully on a Mac when you’re selling a product that only runs under windows? Is it worth making sure your site works with screen readers when you are offering driving lessons? In some situations the answer to both those questions could actually be yes, but what you need to ask yourself is how often is that the case. In addition, some functionality is just impossible to reproduce in an entirely accessible format. In fact, I would go as far as to say it is impossible to make a site entirely accessible anyway. We need to resign ourselves to the fact that accessibility is full of grey areas and we have to endeavour to do the best we can with the resources available to us. We need to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Don’t forget the third camp

At the beginning of this entry, I mentioned three camps. It is important to remember that there is a huge number of web site owners out there that have not faced up to the issue of web site accessibility at all. Arguments like this can just make an intimidating subject even more so. In my opinion, taking one-step into the world of accessibility is better than doing nothing at all.

So think about wading in (with your big size 4s) and join in the debate. How do you currently ensure accessibility? Have you got website governance standards in place and have you ever thought about automated accessibility checking? If not, have a think about trying WebWorxx. WebWorxx does so much more than daily automated accessibility checking for your website - but that, my friends, is for another blog post.

This is a safe place and we love hearing your opinions so drop us a line or download the free WebWorxx trial to see how it can give your web team control.

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.

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.

Understanding where and what content exists is becoming vastly important within organizations. In today’s digital world, as volumes of content increase exponentially, employees are often overloaded with an insurmountable mass of content, resulting in, inefficient internal and external communications within organizations. This was a problem recently encountered by the Vamosa Expert Services  team when working with Statoil.

Statoil had outgrown its Content Management System (CMS), and was unable to manage the existing and insurmountable volume of content. As a result they chose to work with Vamosa to provide a fast, effective and accurate way of analyzing their content.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer, a full content audit of 150,000 pages of web content was performed in just three weeks. Statoil were able to identify problem areas within the corporate estate and automatically remove duplicate, redundant and obsolete content.

Although the analysis allowed Statoil to bring order to the chaos of their digital content, it was essential that measurements were put in place to ensure content quality was maintained on an ongoing basis.  By implementing an Enterprise Content Governance strategy, which defines who can make what decisions, who is accountable for which efforts, and how everyone works together to operate a website and web management process effectively Statoil were able to achieve control over their previously unstructured content.

To help you identify where you experience challenges managing the life of your content, we’ve created an Enterprise Content Governance Framework showing you where Vamosa tools can be used to automate tasks at each stage.

As unstructured content grows exponentially, businesses need to capture, store, manage, integrate and deliver all forms of content across their enterprise. Knowledge workers  need the right information at the right time to make the right decisions.

Managing unstructured data (web content, email, Blogs, user-generated content) is inherently different, and in many ways more challenging, than controlling its structured counterpart. Controlling this ‘digital landfill’- as AIIM would have it – requires organizations to discover what content they have and understand what condition it is in. Through our extensive experience in enterprise content migration projects Vamosa is only too aware of how frequently organizations are faced with these challenges – for example when we recently worked with IBM.

IBM was required to migrate from their legacy system to Lotus Web Content Management (LWCM) in order to gain control of their digital content. A full understanding of their current content inventory was therefore required to ensure that only the necessary content was migrated.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer IBM conducted a full content audit; which involved crawling all content and nullifying any obsolete or redundant content, ensuring there were no broken links and identifying any outdated pages. Once the appropriate content had been identified, it was enhanced, allowing IBM to remove duplicates and manage version control through automated classification and tagging.

Vamosa Content Migrator was then used to simply, automatically and quickly migrate the required content into Lotus WCM within the project’s timescales. Vamosa solutions allowed the project to be completed up to four times faster than alternative approaches, at a quarter of the price and with no impact on day to day operations.

To learn more about the key implementation steps required in order to achieve a successful migration into IBM LWCM, download the 7 Steps to IBM LWCM Migration white paper.

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.

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.

Content Migration is complex; it is not simply a case of ‘lifting and shifting’ content from one content management system (CMS) to another. Web content is often inconsistently structured and spread across multiple locations and sites.

With this in mind, there is a growing requirement for content to be analyzed, enhanced and standardized prior to migration. The cost involved in manually reviewing and migrating content can be significant; but it can be minimized through the use of software to perform automatic analysis and migration – a solution recently provided by Vamosa for the Department of Health and Ageing of Australian Government (DoHA).

DoHA needed to migrate from their legacy CMS to IBM WCM within just eight weeks in order to achieve better control of their internet sites. Vamosa recommended a solution that involved an automatic cleanup and enhancement of their content. This process firstly involved identifying all of the content that was required to be migrated.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer Vamosa Expert Services gained a clear understanding of DoHA’s content inventories and content management activities. The results showed that DoHA had 40 static websites containing 50,000 ‘must have’ pages that were to be migrated.

Vamosa Content Migrator then extracted all of the required content, copying it into the staging repository while allowing business to continue as normal for all DoHA’s employees. The next stage of the process involved exposing all of the content to Vamosa’s rules engine, Vamosa Content Quality Builder, allowing all of the content to be modified both for business requirements and to satisfy the requirements of the target system. The content was then loaded into the target system already ‘fit for purpose’ and ready for productive use.

Vamosa Content Migrator was used to simply, automatically and quickly migrate the required web content and linked documents to IBM Lotus WCM in the stated timescales. The Vamosa toolset in the migration process, compared with the manual alternative, lead to the project being completed

    * Four times faster
    * At a quarter of the price
    * With zero impact on day to day operations

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.
 

Research shows that 85% of acquisitions are a failure in the eyes of the acquirer and one of the most common reasons: a lack of post-acquisition planning.

Buying another company and truly integrating it into your business is an operational challenge. Acquirers need a precise view of the shape and size of the integration plan and the more detail you can articulate then the quicker those acquisition benefits can be realized for your shareholders.

Many integration issues have been addressed in copious lines of print: sales channels, commission structures, accounting systems, headcount strategy, reporting structures, contracts, tax rates, surplus assets, IT Systems – the list is endless. However there is a new area emerging that is dangerously invisible to the Board – Digital Content integration. The world’s digital content is doubling every year and the lack of Governance applied to enterprise content is having a serious business impact on corporations worldwide including: expensive e-discovery audits, executives searching for, but not finding content, inability to migrate and merge content, duplication of content, conflict or breaches of corporate standards, or even a complete lack of standards altogether.

All of these issues are only compounded within the pressure cooker environment of a merger.

We have listed below the top big 8 issues we come across in our work at Vamosa:

1. Content acquired ruins your consistent messaging and corporate identity.
2. New logos are placed all over the new web properties you acquired.
3. Numerous competing Content Management Systems (related to systems that perform the same tasks) results in inefficiencies such as high operating costs.
4. A significant (could be as high as 60%) amount of duplicate content keeps the cost of content ownership high.
5. Content needs to be reassigned as organizational structures change above it.
6. Portal integration should follow quickly after the targeted company has been acquired. However integrating unfamiliar content into an existing portal can stunt integration.
7. Ownership of an Enterprise Content Governance framework is essential to give leadership to content authors.
8. Staff morale can drop rapidly within an acquired company if basic content retrieval, intranet usability and the quality of web sites deteriorates.

In future editions of this blog series we will explore some practical, in-depth solutions. As a taster – here are the headline solutions:

Issue	Solution
Branding of properties	The role of Vamosa Consulting Practise and Vamosa ECoG Suite for Web
Systems Consolidation	Vamosa's ECoG Suite for Web and interaction with Vamosa's Consulting Practise
Redundant and Reassigned Content	Using Vamosa ECoG Suite for Web to eliminate waste
Portal Integration	The deployment of Tagging technologies and how they integrate with Vamosa ECoG Suite for Web
Governance Frameworks	How to implement Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) to extract real value from your content

To learn more about how to overcome these M&A challenges and how to ensure brand governance is maintained visit the Vamosa M&A page.

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.