Website Governance

Mergers and Acquisitions are high profile events and the need to seamlessly combine two disparate content stores and deliver a consistent message to users is vital. To achieve success the project team needs to deal with issues such as brand compliance, application of a single information architecture, content model, and corporate taxonomy. These issues require careful thought and should be an integral part of planning for any merger.

So, why then do so many mergers, carefully thought out in terms of strategy, markets, and organization, stumble on the integration of technology and the valuable content of the user community? One reason is that IT assets and important website and intranet collateral are often absent from the due diligence process.

Research suggests that only around one in six of these projects bring in the data or content migration portion on time and within budget. The main reason for overruns is a failure to fully understand the content to be migrated. In other words, the data sources are neither fully known nor completely understood.

Failure to include content within the due diligence process can lead to high profile, post merger quality issues, such as a lack of brand governance and poor link cohesion.

So, what are the key points to think about when embarking on an M&A project involving digital content. Here are some pointers....

-    Undertake a thorough Content Discovery phase to ensure that you understand the size, structure and scope of the acquired property and the effort required to create a unified content store
-    Consider whether your existing hardware and infrastructure can cope with the additional content and increased numbers of authors and consumers
-    Talk to the content owners and make sure they are involved in any decisions that will affect future content usability
-    Produce a plan with key milestones and deliverables to track progress towards a smooth integration
-    Plan to implement a common IA, content and metadata model which can encompass all content
-    Think about the key customer-facing sections of your site

• branding must be consistent
• navigation and search must function reliably for all content
• duplicate, conflicting and non-compliant content should be identified and removed

-    An ongoing content governance model should be adopted to ensure all future content conforms to the organization’s digital content policies

Removing risk from these projects is a Vamosa speciality, but even without professional support, these pointers will help to keep you on the right track. There are many pitfalls for the unprepared, but taking an organized and structured approach actually enables a merger to benefit content quality, as it is the ideal time for content cleansing and removal of redundant and obsolete content.

Although high risk and highly visible, tackled in the right way, M&A projects provide a platform to a more streamlined and efficient digital content store.


 To learn more about the typical barriers to starting a content migration, download the 'Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality' White Paper.

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.

If you use a Document Management System (DMS) to manage document based content you will already know that one of the key issues faced is how to move existing content into the new system.

On paper document migration looks relatively easy. A team of people could spend the next six months copying files and documents from their existing location into the DMS. However in order to achieve an effective document migration project it is essential that you consider:

•    How many files can one person move in one day? A document migration project of only 100,000 pages might take anywhere between 10 to 100 days to complete.
•    What happens during this move? Do you place a content freeze over all of the files and documents for the duration of the migration project? What about moving attached documents and handling internal and external links? How can you incorporate this functionality into your document migration strategy?

A document migration does not simply mean changing a few attributes and then placing the content into a slightly different information architecture. Document migrations involve the wholesale change of properties, storage, information architecture and content lifecycle, therefore document migration projects tend to involve hundreds of minor changes to very large volumes of data. This can potentially become incredibly time-consuming and frustrating. To reduce this confusion and to improve data quality, eliminate redundant, obsolete and redundant information and match the requirements of your new system, you really need a tried and tested method.

Vamosa Consultancy Practice, with their collective experience gained on over one hundred client projects, can assist in implementing best practice content quality processes; such as when selected to undertake the migration of the website and corporate Intranet for the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Working with integration partner, digital media giant Euro RSCG, Vamosa’s solutions and expertise was the obvious choice to deliver a web and Intranet content migration for Defra.

Gregory Roekens, Technology Director at Euro RSCG said ‘We were asked to provide a best of breed and best value solution to Defra’s business content migration problem and Vamosa’s tools and methods have the reputation as the Central Government standard’.

Vamosa Consulting was able to successfully bring control and structure to all documents across Defra’s content stores, providing, de-duplicated and clean content. As a part of an ongoing Enterprise Content Governance strategy, Vamosa ECoG Suite for Documents also uniquely pinpoints breaches of policy for all document governance areas, and offers an automated process to resolve each breach, allowing document stores to be kept up to code.

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.

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

We talk a lot on the Vamosa blog about  website compliance and content compliance, the importance of it and the cost implications of a company not complying. But I thought that rather than just take our word for it, it would be good to highlight some recent blogs and articles on the topic…

Gartner Research Report ‘MarketScope for E-Discovery Software Product Vendors’ by Debra Logan Whit Andrews and John Bace

The main areas of cost reduction are on processing data by external service providers and less time and therefore money spent on outside attorney review, as less material is passed to them. These benefits are achieved by defensibly culling the amount of data that is passed on to further steps in the e-discovery process, by allowing in-house attorneys to ‘go back to the well’ and refine their searches, coming up with either more data (to avoid sanctions) or to refine existing data sets to the relevant documents to pass on for further consideration.

ZDNet Blog, ‘Ten emerging Enterprise 2.0 technologies to watch,’ Posted by Dion Hinchcliff. Automated compliance monitoring.

One of the less discussed but more important (and often unstated) objections to Enterprise 2.0, especially for public companies and regulated industries, is ensuring that their use is compliant with all local and foreign laws, rules, and regulations. When any worker can easily disseminate information across an entire organization, or even across the world, some organizations want to be aware of problematic situations before they occur. While social media policy for workers has evolved steadily to provide upfront guidance, many companies still want to ensure they can detect compliance violations as quickly as possible before they become an actual problem. Unfortunately, it’s all too common for FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley, European Union Privacy Laws, HIPAA, eDiscovery, etc. to be somewhat neglected in E2.0 discussions, where most of the focus initially is on benefit and not potential risk. The good news is that even though most large firms using social media today don’t actively police their users (IBM is a good example of this), I do find that most firms that already have automated compliance tools like CompliantPro are usually covered. However, expect that compliance will become an increasingly important feature of Enterprise 2.0 platforms…

Gartner Blog ‘A Whole Lotta Lawyers’, Posted by Debra Logan

Electronically stored information(ESI) is a HOT topic in legal circles and most lawyers don’t know all that much about it, or if they do, are concerned with making use of it in any way they can, offensively or defensively.  The problem these days is naturally compounded by the sheer volume of the stuff.  With companies being in the state they are regarding the proper management of information, lawyers can no longer conduct exhaustive searches of all that is available.  In large class action suits (think of the tobacco litigation) there are millions upon millions of individual items that might be considered, millions of items to find, and millions to produce.  It cannot be done without technology, certainly.

e-Discovery Journal ‘What is Information Governance?’,  by Barry Murphy

Information is the lifeblood of businesses; you’ve heard term “information economy,” I hope.  I like to talk about information as the fuel on which businesses run.  Taking that analogy further, raw information assets are like oil – they need to be converted into fuel that can make an engine run; in the case of business, that fuel is knowledge.  A decade ago, knowledge management was all the rage, but very few organizations were able to measure the business benefit of implementing knowledge management systems.

Gartner Blog ‘What is Information Governance? And Why is it So Hard?‘, Posted by Debra Logan

These days, there is the added complication of ‘compliance’, an all purpose stick with which everyone uses to beat everyone else and mostly has resulted in even more reluctance to manage information in any way other than simply allowing it to accumulate for fear that deleting it is forbidden by some obscure law or regulation.    Lawyers have been increasingly dragged into the discussions about information governance and that usually complicates matters, rather than makes them simpler.  Most legal counsel do not know exactly what business documents must be preserved, in every case.  If there is pending litigation, its easy enough, and that they do understand.  Otherwise, they lob the ball back into the business user’s court and the circular arguments begin again.

Ensuring content compliance and e-Discovery should be a top priority for every enterprise. With this comes the need to set content governance and procedures to protect your company against the potential risks and financial losses.







Learn more about how you can control your content and acheive truly effective Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG). Download the Making Enterprise Content Goverance a Reality White Paper.

As Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) specialists, we at Vamosa clearly understand the benefits of findability. However we also realize it is all too frequently under-valued or worse completely overlooked by many. We are possibly too engrossed in our day-to-day activities and findability is simply lost in the list of ‘to-do’s’, or maybe it is on the agenda but carries a negative connotation because it’s perceived as search engine optimization (SEO) grunt work. In any case findability is left at the sidelines because we don’t understand where or how to fit it into our process.

At the most basic level, the goal of findability is to connect your audience with the content you create and the things you write, design and build.  When you produce relevant and valuable content, present it in an accessible format, provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability you are ensuring that you break the communications clutter and that you are reaching your audience with your message. Our PDF on ECOG-Framework shows you the process in stages of how to do this.

Ignoring findability is like shouting over static noise, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. To further complicate the chances of reaching your target audience, a barrage of other web sites are vying for the same commodity—attention.

Findability is a complicated matter that touches every sub-category of our industry, and everyone involved with your web estate has a part to play in making it more findable—this includes project managers, information architects, copywriters, designers, developers, and usability experts. Findability can’t be put off to the end of a project and it can’t be fobbed off as SEO.  Here is some content enhancing information to mull over while you think about your web structure, streamlining content, making the language easy to understand, putting the most important information first, and meta-tagging each page with relevant terms. Meta-tagging is a big and important issue with being found don’t let it be the elephant in the room no-one talks about. Get prepared and have a read at this excellent educational article which explains how search engines find your information and all the different ways your content can help your search ranking. Failing to do so may result in your website being a waste of time and money otherwise. There’s more bang for your buck in educating everyone on your team about the benefits of findability, and their role in achieving its goals.

Speaking of bucks, there’s money to be made by finding a place for findability in your web sites life-cycle. The more findable your content is, the more likely it will be the commercial success you’d hoped. Users will appreciate having clear and concise content and it makes finding information about your services and what you ‘offer’ easier, essentially giving the people what they want. It could be what separates you from the competition, and may help your organization win more business.

These bottom-line benefits make findability an easy sell to a production team and clients alike, and can be summed up with a simple equation:

Findable content = Increased ROI

What’s not to like about that?

However in order for findability to be effective, it needs to be understood and embraced by all who plan, design, and build on the web. Despite this, when you consider the possible potential benefits of findabiity, it’s easy to see why you should care about being found.

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When you create content, what happens to it? Does it get uploaded to your website, to be forgotten about, or become redundant over time?

Content has a life – and one that doesn’t stop when published. This is an oversight often made by many enterprises and organizations. Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) is the process of taking content through its lifecycle, from initiation to creation, control and consumption. In fact, there are sixteen stages in this lifecycle.

Phase 1 is to initiate, or in other words manage change requests. At this stage, you need to prioritize content, authorize and make decisions as to deleting old, redundant files or creating new ones.

Then you move onto Phase 2, creating the content: authoring, tagging and authorization. Phase 3 is where control is applied. Content is structured and migrated to a CMS. During this process, rules and policies need to be applied to ensure content adheres to both internal and external guidelines (such as branding and legislation).

The last phase deals with the usage of content: its findability, managing your assets, monitoring and maintaining content. At this point you might decide that changes need to be made. Perhaps your content is now out-dated or not needed, taking you back to Phase 1: requests to change content.

Throughout this journey changes must be authorized and rules and policies must be applied. You must be clear who in your organization holds the decision-making powers and what rules what is important for your organization to govern your content.

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







To understand further how you can achieve effective Enterprise Content Governance and  improve content quality in five steps download the Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality White Paper.

Web accessibility is becoming more important as businesses are increasingly generating new content. There is lots of good advice and guidelines provided by W3C, Disable Discrimination Act, RNIB, Government etc… that focuses on how to make a website accessible. Good mark-up is the foundation of a usable, accessible and robust website. The HTML and CSS which passes the validation test can be very useful, but this is not the same as accessibility. HTML validators do not check that the ‘ALT’ attributes are relevant, or that link text is useful

Accessibility is very subjective even when using standardized guidelines. I believe organizations should make their documents as accessible as they can, but remain committed to improving the accessibility of any document when and if an issue is brought to their attention. It is very challenging to create content which is accessible to people with different disabilities for e.g. content may be accessible to either the visually impaired or those that are hard of hearing, but may not be accessible to those that are deaf-blind.

I think that it is fair to assume that an accessible web is necessary to provide everyone with the right to freely participate in the cultural life of community, to enjoy and share scientific advancement and its benefits. The web accessibility guidelines are not simply legislative, they are a moral obligation. Looking at a recent example, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Comittee, they stated ‘where practical and possible, we added additional options to meet the needs of those with visual impairments’. Despite this attempt many felt that the site was not a significant improvement on previous Olympic sites – sites which have previously been subjects to human-rights injunctions, regarding accessibility, which they have lost.

This shows that there is still a long way to go before content created and published within the public domain is made 100% accessible to everyone. The UK government has a commitment to make all the local government web sites accessible for every citizen by the end of 2010 and this poses a very difficult but essential challenge

We at Vamosa understand the difficulties associated in keeping content in line with W3C guidelines and thus provide solutions that allow organizations to automatically check and fix any breaches should they occur, ensuring content quality is maintained in line with your organizations Accessibility and HTML standards while adehering to Enterprise Content Governance Standards.

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’.