Defining a Governance Model

Defining a Governance Model

Intranets, Extranets & Websites

1Toronto | Ottawa | Calgary | Regina | New York

What is (CMS) governance?

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Ask 20 people, get 20 answers.

1. A set of policies, roles, responsibilities and

processes to guide, direct and control how

your CMS is used to accomplish business

goals

2. A set of workflows and permissions implemented in

your CMS

3. The authoritative administrative structures that set

policy and standards for Web product management

Don‟t forget why you implemented a CMS (and a website) in the first place!

Common reasons

1. To remove the IT bottleneck

2. To empower distributed content authors to

manage their own content

3. To enforce standards across your web properties

4. To automate processes for greater efficiency

5. To manage web content as a proper digital asset

and your website as a proper channel

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A thought experiment

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The Problem

Two different departments

have critical events

happening at the same time

and both want to be on the

homepage. There‟s not

enough room.

Who decides what goes on

the homepage?

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The Problem

You are considering changing

the way you label navigation

on your website.

Who is responsible for

looking at search analytics to

determine the vocabulary

your visitors actually use?

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The Problem

There is a clear business case

for a new faceted search

engine.

It will benefit almost every

group that produces content in

the organization.

What budget does it come

from? Who authorizes the

purchase?

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The Problem

The number of online

registrations has dropped by

25%. (Increasing

registrations is a key

objective of the website)

Who reacts?

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The Problem

A series of untrue, near-

slanderous blog posts are

made about your

organization and retweeted.

Who is responsible for

knowing this is happening?

Who decides how to

respond?

What can we do?

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Today, I hope to …

1. Draw a bigger circle around WCM governance

that goes beyond workflows and permissions

2. Provide you some helpful examples for aligning

the right people in the right place(s)

3. Offer some suggestions for the tough questions

What happens if you don‟t put “good” governance in place?

• Messy, uncontrolled growth of content

• Organizational conflict

• Poor adoption and resistance to change

• Operational inefficiency

• Loss of credibility

• Risk of litigation

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Typical governance FAIL

• No senior champion

• Project is an IT-driven initiative

• Web team has limited budget and power

• No consideration for change management

• No plan or vision

• Assuming the technology will handle everything

• Greatest barrier to success = politics

• Greatest key to success = senior champion12

Recap: what types of governance models exist?

• Decentralized (common in larger orgs)

• No single owner

• Driven by policies and guidelines

• Organic growth, sometimes leading to site sprawl

• Centralized (common in smaller orgs)

• Single owner/department

• Bureaucratic

• Highly controlled

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What types of governance models exist?

• Collaborative

• Executive champion

• Steering committee / council

• Decentralized content ownership

• Centralized platform

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But first…consider the complexities of the modern corporate website

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Base web content

Global taxonomy

Analytics and key performance indicators

Extranet functionality/social and user-generated content

Content sharing/integration with business systems (CRM, DAM, intranet)

“Web engagement management” – personalization, marketing automation, content profiling

Multiple channels (RSS, mobile)

Content and website lifecycle

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A collaborative WCM governance model for a large, distributed organization

Executive sponsor

Web steering team

Web team

Content authors

The executive team/sponsor

Roles and responsibilities

1. Defining the overall strategy and priorities for the

website.

2. Allocation of funds

3. Ensuring that the right people are in the right positions

for online success

4. Reviewing and approving brand guidelines

5. Sets high-level policies

6. Acting as a the final authority for resolving conflicts

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A committed sponsor

• Doesn‟t just sign the cheque

• Takes responsibility for the project

• Wants to see the project succeed

• Is fully informed and educated on the project

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Some tips

• The business case should sell itself

• Education is key

• Provide the sponsor with ongoing status and goal

updates

• Do not hide shortcomings

• Consider quick wins to show immediate value and

maintain support

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The web steering team

Advice:the Internet Strategy Forum (2009)

1. The role of internal online strategist has shifted:

more than 60% of such positions are within two

levels of the CEO

2. The importance of the internet is growing in

many organizations – the introduction of senior

executive roles responsible for online execution

3. Recommendation: Create a separate Internet

strategic management function (do not force into

IT or marketing as they exist)

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The web steering team

Roles and responsibilities

1. Resolve questions of conflicting priorities based on

objectives set by ES

2. Brand enforcement - has power to deny proposals

3. Define internal and external content; create policies

on content lifecycle

4. Coordinate activities, reducing duplication

5. Decide how best to address new regulatory or

legislative requirements

6. Review metrics and using these to drive decisions

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The web steering team

Committees and membership

1. Break down role into multiple committees

reporting to the WST

2. Members may be VP-level or middle

management – ensure a decisions are made in an

effective and timely manner

3. Members should represent a healthy cross-

section of departments with an interest in the

website >> recall the website layer cake!

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The web team

Roles and responsibilities

1. Undertake ongoing analysis of user behaviour and report on this behaviour to ES and WST

2. Content approval, workflow and permissions decisions

3. Provide training and support to content creators

4. Monitor and tune the site search engine

5. Implement search engine optimization tactics

6. Staying on the “cutting edge” as appropriate

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Knowledge half-life

• The half life of knowledge in a given field is how

long it takes for half of industry current expertise

to become irrelevant or incorrect

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Industry Knowledge Half-Life

Mechanical Engineering 20 years

Medicine 10 years

Traditional Marketing 7 years

Internet Marketing 3 years

Social Media Marketing 1 year or less

Content contributors

Roles and responsibilities

1. Creation and editing of content

2. Entry of content into WCM

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Competencies for online success

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Technology

Strategy & Direction

Social Media

Outreach

Content Creation

Education &

Mentoring

Map competency tasks to teams

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Web team Web Steering Team

ExecutiveTeam

External expertise

Technology

Support of daily operations

X

New technology deployments

X

Business analysis X

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Content governance: Where the rubber hits the road

Effective CMS content governance

• Flows naturally from people alignment

• Provides the right balance of guidance and

empowerment

• Is key to a successful CMS deployment

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Key ingredients: your content governance plan

• Owned by web team.

• Build an authorship model

This determines who will be allowed to create and edit content for

each area of the site, including tagging, personalization and forms

• Create an authorization and permission model

Documents the types of users and their access privileges – including

those administering ongoing business functions such as A|B testing

and analytics reporting. Can be as granular as text editor buttons.

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More ingredients

• Develop a workflow model

Content approval prior to publishing, including user-generated and

social content.

• Publication strategy

How frequently content will be published to the live web server, how

exceptions will be handled and who can accelerate publishing

• Define an archiving strategy

When and how is content removed from the site? What freshness

checks can be put in place?

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What about extranets?

Extranet user management

• An entirely separate set of permissions and workflows

• Often requires business input:

• channel relationships (clients, partners, constituents)

• business system/portal integration (e-commerce, account management

systems)

• Ensure your web steering team has adequate

representation from these stakeholders

• Ensure your web team has the right skillsets and

enough resources to manage these elements

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Extranet community

• May or may not allow subsite/feature provisioning

• Communities, blogs, forums

• If so, lean towards an intranet governance model

• Add a community manager or curator to your web

team.

• They will need extra support if user-generated content is to be

closely monitored.

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Advice from the trenches

Advice from the trenches

• Align your people BEFORE your implementation

starts!

• Before technical planning

• Before information architecture

• Maybe even before web strategy

• If you‟ve already got a mess on your hands…

• All the more reason. Decision-making structure should be

crystal clear when wading through a mess.

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Advice from the trenches

• Prepare people for governance sessions

• Use your information architecture

• When in doubt, keep it simple.

• Educate people on CMS concepts:

workflow, permissions, publication and other content-related

processes.

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The Colouring Exercise

Homepage

About Us

History

Philosophy

Careers

Products

Widget

Doodad

Thingy

Press Room

Press Releases

Videos

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Children (and adults) like boundaries

• Give people clear guidelines

• Alignment with brand and company messaging

• What's considered inappropriate and what's okay to share

• How people read and scan web content

• Visual design guidance – restricting # words

• Search engine optimization principles

• Your CMS can help you here…

• Build in help text and guidelines on every field

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Supplementary skillsets can help too…

• The web is a distinct and unique medium –

consider adding a content strategist to your

team

• What is a content strategist?

• Rachel Lovinger: A content strategist is a [role] with specialized

focus on using words and data to create unambiguous content

that supports meaningful, interactive experiences.

• Can play an important role in content lifecycle

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How to encourage adoption

• Engage evangelists and spread the word

• Training – people fear the unknown

• Support structure

• Involve users as early as possible

• People will change if the change is worthwhile

• Restrict as much as possible, within reason

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Act it out

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Workshop – 20 minutes duration

1. Select some small object to represent a piece of

content

2. Choose individuals or teams to represent ownership

within the website

3. Act out a process from start to end, including all

approval steps and exchanges of information

4. Repeat until your point is made

Sketch it out

Visual is powerful

1. Creating simple pictures is an incredibly powerful

way to discover ideas and solve problems

2. Get everyone up to the whiteboard!

3. Very effective in sessions where team members

sketched out their ideal homepage

44Credit: Dan Roam

Use some persuasion

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Human Behaviour 101

1. One of the best ways to get people to do

something? Turn it into a game and add some

competition. We just can‟t resist.

2. 50 insights into human behaviour that can be

applied not only to web design, but also to

business processes.

3. Getmentalnotes.com (Stephen Anderson)

The $100 Game

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Activity: Around 20 minutes

1. You are provided with a list of priorities and $100

to „spend‟.

2. Distribute the money across the priorities

according to how important those features.

3. Explain and defend why you have divided your

money in this way.

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The Problem

You are considering changing

the way you label navigation

on your website.

Who is responsible for

looking at search analytics to

determine the vocabulary

your visitors actually use?

A good answer

• The web team is responsible for monitoring

analytics and reporting findings to the web

steering team.

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The Problem

Two different departments

have critical events

happening at the same time

and both want to be on the

homepage. There‟s not

enough room.

Who makes this decision?

A good answer

• The web steering team makes the call.

• Does not need to be escalated to the executive team unless

absolutely necessary

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The Problem

There is a clear business case

for a new faceted search

engine.

It will benefit almost every

group that produces content in

the organization.

What budget does it come

from? Who authorizes the

purchase?

A good answer

• The executive team makes the funding decision

and allocates budget as required.

52

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The Problem

The number of online

registrations has dropped by

25%. (Increasing

registrations is a key

objective of the website)

Who reacts?

A good answer

• The executive team pays attention to this and

imposes an appropriate strategy and reaction

chain through the steering and web teams

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The Problem

A series of untrue, near-

slanderous blog posts are

made about your

organization and retweeted.

Who is responsible for

knowing this is happening?

Who decides how to

respond?

A good answer

• Marketing and/or communications might take

responsibility for this

• Social media monitoring

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MonitoringUpon discovering a comment

about the initiative, first

determine the channel:

Social Media Response MatrixCreated by non~linear creations, December 2009

Active Channels-Twitter

- YouTube

- Flickr

Neutral Channels- Blogs

- Open Forums

Closed Channels

- Facebook

- MySpace

-Closed Forums

Is this person in your

network?

(Twitter follower,

YouTube subscriber,

Flickr contact)

Check their stream. Do

they post a lot about

related topics?

Invite them to connect

Y

N

Y

N

Ac

tion

s

Monitor

(See Notes)

Is comment positive / neutral?

Let Stand

(See Notes)

Concur, Add or Thank

(See Notes)

Fix

(See Notes)

Reach Out

(See Notes)

Is it something you can

respond to?

Is the comment off-topic for them

or clearly just meant to

antagonize?

Is it a rage piece? Are they venting

or ranting without a cohesive

argument?

Is there a factual error? Is the

comment misguided but rational?

Does the commenter have a

specific concern or issue that can

be addressed?

Is it something you can otherwise

respond to?

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

Takeaways

• Invest in people alignment

• It’s worth the time, effort and expense

• There are good and effective ways to structure everyone and

everything for online success

• Form teams spanning traditional silos

• IT should not drive CMS initiatives

• Ensure your governance model spans the website

“layer cake”

• There is much more than just web content to consider58

Add NLC closing slides

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