Enterprise Web Strategy
7:21 pm
An enterprise web strategy coordinates all ongoing and planned web related activities of an organization. The purpose is to provide visibility and accountability of web projects, look for synergies, avoid conflicts and present a more consistent and appropriate web user experience to customers, partners and employees. A comprehensive web strategy is critical for managing and improving the information flow, IT culture, and user experience at a large organization (actually you don’t need to be THAT large to need a good strategy – we have helped organization’s with as few as 200 employees get a better command of their web strategy).
Benefits of a Web Strategy
A comprehensive web strategy facilitates the conversation between IT and the rest of the business, helping both sides understand the long term vision, priorities, and necessary prerequisites for achieving goals efficiently with minimum redundancy and avoiding unnecessary cost. By allowing your IT organization to take a step back and get in front of demands rather than operate in perpetual reaction mode, you allow for investments that are more strategic and which lay a foundation that can be leveraged across projects, thus simplifying the overall architecture, encouraging reuse, and decreasing development time.
One thing we help our clients understand is that everyone is in the information business and that IT should not be treated as secondary to other business considerations. Your IT architecture is more important that the building you occupy, than the expansion into a new region, than the creation of a new business unit. You would not assign any but your best people into roles so important to your organization’s future and yet IT is often neglected even though in impacts more aspects of your business and touches ALL of your customers. As the web becomes ever more embedded in business and society it’s importance to your organization only continues to increase.
Further more, the risks of doing nothing are growing. Social networking sites and other technology enables more and more employees to become “web publishers”. Without policy, oversight, and enforcement – there are many risks not just for PR problems when things go wrong, but even the success of individual projects done outside of coordinated web strategy can cause problems as your business brand becomes lost in an ocean of information, leaving users confused and frustrated. Individuals and departments often solve their individual problems but create a bigger one for the organization as a whole.
Method
The process of developing a web strategy for the first time, or auditing an existing program is something that many organizations feel is best completed by an independent outside consult since it is sometimes difficult to get an honest assessment of capabilities and an understanding of the true value (and cost) from the IT and business teams closest to projects.
The methodology for conducting an enterprise web strategy begins like any project: with an understanding of overall objectives and by defining the long term vision. Starting with the first workshop, it is important to document the objectives of the business, IT, and of the users – including customers, employees, and partners – anyone that needs to interact with the information or people of an organization online. At the same time you should begin a comprehensive inventory of all sites, web applications, and systems that feed into or power an organization’s web presence. This may sound like a simple task but surprisingly few organizations have a complete picture of everything going on online in their name. This inventory should include intranet, extranet, and internet properties as well as third party sites that are closely tied to an organization. When we conduct an inventory, we document who manages the site (if anyone); interview stakeholders, users and developers to understand the purpose and promise (the intended brand) of the site; the goals of the site’s users and weather they are being met (the actual brand); what major defects exist; and the road-map of plans for the site’s future. We also collect a variety of other technical information such as platform, database type, where documentation is stored and names and contact info of the developers. This inventory becomes a critical tool not only for our own analysis but to the ongoing governance of the enterprise web experience. In almost every case, our deliverables include a proposed governance program including team structure, roles and responsibilities and a set of regular activities including regular reviews of the “site registry” (as the inventory comes to be called) to ensure that once it is completed it doesn’t get out-of-date.
Once an inventory is conducted we analyze the organization’s capabilities against a reference architecture to create a gap analysis. The Base22 reference architecture contains descriptions and checklists of functionality we know to be important to the operation of a healthy web information ecosystem in an organization. The diagram below shows a simplified high-level example of the kind of functionality and features we measure.
While an organization may have “something” in each niche, the components may not be fully integrated or may be missing critical features. For example, enterprise web search is an important and necessary tool that users expect to be available. Even the most poorly managed web user experience includes some kind of search, but is the search federated across all sources of data and information. What is the current opinion of search by users? What is the search success rate (percentage of times a user finds what they were looking for)? Depending on the answers to these and other questions we give the search component a score. In the end we often present these findings as a color-coordinated chart that shows the existing gaps.
Once gaps are identified and prioritized we begin working on a road-map to close the gaps. The milestones are organized to provide both short term relief to immediate trouble areas and business objectives while moving toward a long term goal. The road-map becomes a tool used by the web governance program to coordinate, plan, budget, and review web projects.
Ask for help
A project like this can be politically sensitive. Feelings can be hurt and egos bruised with just the suggestion that such a project is even necessary so it is important that the project team be staffed with a wide range of participants from across the organization and that it has executive sponsorship and involvement. This is critical to make sure all doors are opened and all black-boxes examined. We also recommend you engage with a trusted partner to get that all important outsiders perspective and sanity check. By having done this many times I can safely say that there are somethings that you simply can no longer see once you have been working somewhere too long. You drank the kool-aid, your senses have numbed and at some point even the best of us stop asking questions. Even if you think you have all the skills to do this yourself, make sure you have someone around who is not afraid to “look stupid” by asking “silly” questions like: Why do you need four different content management systems, or six portals, or three CRMs that do the same thing again? Trust me, its a difficult question to ask over and over till you find the true crux of the problem that will eventually led you to a unified solution.
Contact us
Base22 provides enterprise web strategy consulting services to large, complex organizations and to business that want to avoid the cost of becoming complex in the first place. These strategies are often a part of an enterprise employee portal project such as at Northrup Grumman and Nissan Motor Company or a stand alone web strategy project as at ORC Worldwide. If you are thinking a web strategy may help your organization, let us help you get started with a free consultation.
