Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Sky High or Free Fall – All Aboard the Web Rollercoaster
Should own up to a vested interest here – this session is by David Sweeney – who used to be IT director at my place – and is now a Vice Principal there – so I guess I’d better be nice. It will be interesting to compare David’s talk and our experience on the ground at RHUL!
Starting point – David believes that IT should not just be ‘serving’ the institution, but also influencing and changing the institution – making it better.
Now getting a mention – apparently I trashed most of the talk on the way up on the train yesterday!
David is setting the RHUL Context (and taking an opportunity to trash Manchester – which seems a bit harsh). Anyway – basically Research led stuff. Still think we’ve got a long way to go here – although we have invested in academic research in terms of academic staff, all our support services are about supporting teaching (in the main), not about supporting research. Look at the website http://www.rhul.ac.uk and consider the profile of research.
So – the web:
IT First / Marketing Last – this is the history of the web. We need to move on from this. Agreed – but we still struggle with this. I’m not sure we really have the right structures in place to acheive this. Interestingly the speaker from the LSE yesterday is moving from the IT section to PR/Marketing section – is this the way things are going to go? For the ‘central’ web presence – our online ‘publications’ like the ‘online prospectus’ this has to sit in the same place as the print publications.
Do we understand why web-sites really work? We are working with an audience with hugely varying skills, and very different styles of ‘information engagement’. Also – coming back to a conversation with the LSE speaker yesterday – LSE believe that they shouldn’t try to satisfy more than 3 customer groups with a single web site – this definitely rang bells, as I feel that RHUL main page (and many HE institutions front pages – especially the ‘research led’ ones) doesn’t have enough focus – because we don’t know who we are trying to communicate with.
Are we (IT people) distracted by the latest and greatest technology, and not spending enough time actually consolidating what we are delivering? I agree with this – but we need both aspects. Look at the Warwick blogs stuff – really trendy, techy stuff which has worked.
On the otherhand we need those who are delivering our professional publications to be working on stable and reliable platforms, and controlling and driving what is happening. This, once again, comes back to the ownership – marketing/PR/communications has to own this stuff – IT is just a service isn’t it? Both sides need to realise this and the institutional management needs to realise this – otherwise our web presence will not deliver what the institution needs.
However, I think we are talking about a specific area of our web presence. Marketing/Comms/PR need to control the institutional publication – but not necessarily everything else on the web. At the very least we need to prioritise where we start. At the same time we definitely need more of the marketing skills and awareness across the organisation. And the same with web skills.
Is there something specific about these areas which makes it difficult? Everyone thinks they can do communication, and a lot of people think they can do web stuff (publishing for everyone) – perhaps any situation where the professional skills are not correctly valued we get a similar problem? Do we need a reassessment of the actual skills here? What are the difficult bits? What is the ‘anyone can do this’ stuff?
David is covering a lot of stuff on the RHUL Brand – why we have changed our key messages, and how they way our publications look is part of that message.
The final part of the puzzle – communicating the brand – the key messages – of the institution to the members of that institution. I said to David yesterday that I still didn’t feel I knew the key messages of the institution – or that I didn’t believe them yet (back to ‘research led’ – are we really? what is the evidence?) – and I’m really involved in this stuff. I think that perhaps different areas of the institution might have different views still.
Finally – a challenge from David – ‘how can I, in my job, make my institution better?’
written by ostephens
\\ tags: IWMW 2005
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Sky High or Free Fall – All Aboard the Web Rollercoaster
Should own up to a vested interest here – this session is by David Sweeney – who used to be IT director at my place – and is now a Vice Principal there – so I guess I’d better be nice. It will be interesting to compare David’s talk and our experience on the ground at RHUL!
Starting point – David believes that IT should not just be ‘serving’ the institution, but also influencing and changing the institution – making it better.
Now getting a mention – apparently I trashed most of the talk on the way up on the train yesterday!
David is setting the RHUL Context (and taking an opportunity to trash Manchester – which seems a bit harsh). Anyway – basically Research led stuff. Still think we’ve got a long way to go here – although we have invested in academic research in terms of academic staff, all our support services are about supporting teaching (in the main), not about supporting research. Look at the website http://www.rhul.ac.uk and consider the profile of research.
So – the web:
IT First / Marketing Last – this is the history of the web. We need to move on from this. Agreed – but we still struggle with this. I’m not sure we really have the right structures in place to acheive this. Interestingly the speaker from the LSE yesterday is moving from the IT section to PR/Marketing section – is this the way things are going to go? For the ‘central’ web presence – our online ‘publications’ like the ‘online prospectus’ this has to sit in the same place as the print publications.
Do we understand why web-sites really work? We are working with an audience with hugely varying skills, and very different styles of ‘information engagement’. Also – coming back to a conversation with the LSE speaker yesterday – LSE believe that they shouldn’t try to satisfy more than 3 customer groups with a single web site – this definitely rang bells, as I feel that RHUL main page (and many HE institutions front pages – especially the ‘research led’ ones) doesn’t have enough focus – because we don’t know who we are trying to communicate with.
Are we (IT people) distracted by the latest and greatest technology, and not spending enough time actually consolidating what we are delivering? I agree with this – but we need both aspects. Look at the Warwick blogs stuff – really trendy, techy stuff which has worked.
On the otherhand we need those who are delivering our professional publications to be working on stable and reliable platforms, and controlling and driving what is happening. This, once again, comes back to the ownership – marketing/PR/communications has to own this stuff – IT is just a service isn’t it? Both sides need to realise this and the institutional management needs to realise this – otherwise our web presence will not deliver what the institution needs.
However, I think we are talking about a specific area of our web presence. Marketing/Comms/PR need to control the institutional publication – but not necessarily everything else on the web. At the very least we need to prioritise where we start. At the same time we definitely need more of the marketing skills and awareness across the organisation. And the same with web skills.
Is there something specific about these areas which makes it difficult? Everyone thinks they can do communication, and a lot of people think they can do web stuff (publishing for everyone) – perhaps any situation where the professional skills are not correctly valued we get a similar problem? Do we need a reassessment of the actual skills here? What are the difficult bits? What is the ‘anyone can do this’ stuff?
David is covering a lot of stuff on the RHUL Brand – why we have changed our key messages, and how they way our publications look is part of that message.
The final part of the puzzle – communicating the brand – the key messages – of the institution to the members of that institution. I said to David yesterday that I still didn’t feel I knew the key messages of the institution – or that I didn’t believe them yet (back to ‘research led’ – are we really? what is the evidence?) – and I’m really involved in this stuff. I think that perhaps different areas of the institution might have different views still.
Finally – a challenge from David – ‘how can I, in my job, make my institution better?’
written by ostephens
\\ tags: IWMW 2005
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Challenges at the University of Manchester arising from Project UNITY
This is going to cover more than just web – as it is the whole picture which is important.
Victoria University of Manchester merged with UMIST to form the new ‘University of Manchester’. Obviously a huge project, and extremely expensive.
Information services is central to the university – but much of the infrastructure etc is hidden from the university – and the technology is obviously subject to continual change. So far, all pretty straightforward – general IT and UK HE context stuff – Lifelong learning, Globalisation, etc.
A question for the new institution was ‘what is world class’. One aspect of this is ‘smart’ IT systems. Also facing the ‘virtual challenge’ – dealing with the ‘virtual university’ phenomenon. This is an interesting area because everyone is aware of the potential, but realising that potential is obviously extremely difficult – as few, or no, institutions have managed this.
Speaker is racing through this – finding it difficult to keep up.
Manchester were looking at providing a ‘Gateway’ to information – basically a portal (although the speaker doesn’t like this term, as he feels it is ambiguous)
For the web – the web has become the vehicle which facilitates access. In 5 years the speaker is predicting that:
everyone will be working with a ‘A5-ish’ (sized) device/PDA
Wireless (highspeed)
Simple interfaces (keyboard/mouse paradigm)
Scribble pad/voice command recognising
He suggests that 5 years is the limit on realistic predictions. This is interesting, as I’m not convinced by these predictions – everything he describes is feasible in terms of technology and cost – but will people use it? I’m not completely convinced that we are going to see a move from the small mobile phone/pda type device to a larger type of device that he is suggesting.
Now he has moved onto ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) – about integrating key business and management processes. Meant to solve the problem of integrating best of breed systems. The challenge of ERP is that it usually means reworking the business processes – which means changing peoples jobs – which is difficult.
ERP takes 1-3 years to apply in the corporate sector – but this is likely to be much longer (3-5 years?) in the HE environment, as they are very different in terms of management structure.
This is all very interesting, but the speed of delivery and the jumping from one thing to another is making it a bit hard to follow.
The speaker is suggesting that portal technology is changing very rapidly, so those institutions with ‘portal’ technology will be going through constant change.
Some stuff about the ‘information society’ – nothing out of the ordinary – born digital stuff, cost of information, finding information.
Some stuff about semantic web and metatdata. MS adopting xml as a standard for Office documents.
Mentioning ‘blinkx’ – desktop knowledge management
Back to Manchester context:
Branding
CMS
Web is too expensive and too ‘static’ – needs to be driven from data and information systems, must be knowledge enabled, must deliver to the user expectations.
A quote from the speaker – “The web is an enabler and must be owned strategically by the Institution”
Is this realistic? Or even sensible? I accept that institutions have to ‘own’ their publications – but this seems to be independent of the medium? I can’t see that you are going to stop individuals publishing in the web medium. In fact, based on the Warwick experience you can leverage the fact that this is going to happen. On reflection, perhaps this is part of the ‘ownership’ – by providing systems that work and are easy to use, you gain some level of control? No one will do it the hard way if the easy way is easy enough?
written by ostephens
\\ tags: IWMW 2005
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Challenges at the University of Manchester arising from Project UNITY
This is going to cover more than just web – as it is the whole picture which is important.
Victoria University of Manchester merged with UMIST to form the new ‘University of Manchester’. Obviously a huge project, and extremely expensive.
Information services is central to the university – but much of the infrastructure etc is hidden from the university – and the technology is obviously subject to continual change. So far, all pretty straightforward – general IT and UK HE context stuff – Lifelong learning, Globalisation, etc.
A question for the new institution was ‘what is world class’. One aspect of this is ‘smart’ IT systems. Also facing the ‘virtual challenge’ – dealing with the ‘virtual university’ phenomenon. This is an interesting area because everyone is aware of the potential, but realising that potential is obviously extremely difficult – as few, or no, institutions have managed this.
Speaker is racing through this – finding it difficult to keep up.
Manchester were looking at providing a ‘Gateway’ to information – basically a portal (although the speaker doesn’t like this term, as he feels it is ambiguous)
For the web – the web has become the vehicle which facilitates access. In 5 years the speaker is predicting that:
everyone will be working with a ‘A5-ish’ (sized) device/PDA
Wireless (highspeed)
Simple interfaces (keyboard/mouse paradigm)
Scribble pad/voice command recognising
He suggests that 5 years is the limit on realistic predictions. This is interesting, as I’m not convinced by these predictions – everything he describes is feasible in terms of technology and cost – but will people use it? I’m not completely convinced that we are going to see a move from the small mobile phone/pda type device to a larger type of device that he is suggesting.
Now he has moved onto ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) – about integrating key business and management processes. Meant to solve the problem of integrating best of breed systems. The challenge of ERP is that it usually means reworking the business processes – which means changing peoples jobs – which is difficult.
ERP takes 1-3 years to apply in the corporate sector – but this is likely to be much longer (3-5 years?) in the HE environment, as they are very different in terms of management structure.
This is all very interesting, but the speed of delivery and the jumping from one thing to another is making it a bit hard to follow.
The speaker is suggesting that portal technology is changing very rapidly, so those institutions with ‘portal’ technology will be going through constant change.
Some stuff about the ‘information society’ – nothing out of the ordinary – born digital stuff, cost of information, finding information.
Some stuff about semantic web and metatdata. MS adopting xml as a standard for Office documents.
Mentioning ‘blinkx’ – desktop knowledge management
Back to Manchester context:
Branding
CMS
Web is too expensive and too ‘static’ – needs to be driven from data and information systems, must be knowledge enabled, must deliver to the user expectations.
A quote from the speaker – “The web is an enabler and must be owned strategically by the Institution”
Is this realistic? Or even sensible? I accept that institutions have to ‘own’ their publications – but this seems to be independent of the medium? I can’t see that you are going to stop individuals publishing in the web medium. In fact, based on the Warwick experience you can leverage the fact that this is going to happen. On reflection, perhaps this is part of the ‘ownership’ – by providing systems that work and are easy to use, you gain some level of control? No one will do it the hard way if the easy way is easy enough?
written by ostephens
\\ tags: IWMW 2005
Bit tired this morning (too much time spent in the ‘Lass of Gowrie’ and the conference centre bar) – but a good breakfast, and now ready (hopefully) for this morning’s talks. Starting with a talk on ‘Project UNITY’ – which is not actually some bid for world peace, but (I think) about the merger of the University of Manchester and UMIST IT Infrastructures
written by ostephens
\\ tags: IWMW 2005
£2.80 a pint
Got to love Manchester
written by ostephens
No wireless network up here – so have to post this later.
So – first question – who are we, and who/what annoys you in relation to the web…
The answer to the first seems to be – mainly people are from ‘web teams’, but a few marketing people as well – and to the second – other people who edit web content – and think they know better than ‘us’.
There are actually quite a variety of ‘gripes’ coming out:
Content producers – getting content and getting appropriate content
Techies ‘fiddling’
‘rogue’ web authors
Marketing department
Imposed ‘systems’
Lack of support/investment from ‘senior management’
Unrealistic expectation of content producer
Lack of communication
So – basically everyone is an expert and feels that they should ‘own’ the web presence.
The first question for me is – why is the ‘web’ regarded as a single thing? We don’t talk about ‘print’ and expect one owner etc. – or do we?
Onto a case study – the launch of a staff portal – which will:
Manage HR Records
Manage publications
Manage research administration
Produce automatic staff web profiles (for external facing website)
The stakeholders were:
Coporate systems / portal team
Web team (mostly external facing web sites, provision of tools etc to web publishers)
Academic IT Services
Admin depts: HR, Finance, etc.
Management
So essentially the drive seemed to come from Management wanting a way of dealing RAE requirements, driving a publications database (taking it from Academic depts, and giving to Corporate systems), and then the Web team using the data in this database to drive staff profiles).
Now into a group exercise – I’m in group ‘C’ (whoo hoo). The ‘break out’ room is a lot more comfortable than the presentation room – comfy sofas.
So – a number of tasks – we are acting as the ‘web team’ – and have novelty pirate hats (to lighten the tone apparently)
We now have to negotiate with the ‘marketing team’ and then present to ‘senior management’ about the solution we have up with.
So – basically we presented to Senior Management the following points:
Firstly – market research – both teams agreed… Objective research on what the end user wants
Pilot for overall standard of web content across institution
Suggestion to Senior Management for financial support
Content – generation etc. ease of updating.
Work together for central strategy
Interestingly in our group, we came to this kind of compromise – making an argument for an institutional strategy. The other group actually seemed to be a bit dominated by the web team – with marketing paying out £12,000 for the web team to do the work – and were looking at the very specific outcomes.
OK – so it all ended up being a bit of a love-in – in reality there are lots of other factors – history, personality, refusal to engage etc. Also, the question for our group is what happens if the ‘senior management’ team actually don’t have the political will to go through with trying to establish a corporate web presence?
The case study presented in the session seems to hinge quite a bit on ‘management’ saying that ‘this is going to happen’.
written by ostephens
\\ tags: IWMW 2005
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Discussion Groups
OK – first discussion group – about the challenge of a CMS (Content Management System). Never blogged a discussion group before – don’t know how this will go.
Currently seem to be some problem – we don’t have a chair for the discussion. OK – so we have a volunteer from City University – Tim Matschak. I since I’m blogging this anyway – I might as well be the ‘reporter’.
So – we need to have 3 ‘challenges’ for further discussion tomorrow.
Firstly – who uses a CMS? Under half – but basically everyone seems to have the intention of using a CMS in the future, if they aren’t already. So – we start with a brainstorm:
Challanges
Choosing – getting the right CMS
Timescales – don’t spend too long on choosing this
Platform independence (with Editor)
How to use it
Setup/Implementation
Buy-in – institutional/user
Delegated rights management
Cost – captial and recurrent
Ongoing support/training
Flexibility
Managing (users) expectations
Integration
Migration
Web standards
Future proofing
Dynamic content
Ownership – IT, Communications
Scope
Accessibility (Output)
Usability (Editor)
Seeing through marketing
Realistic about Open Source developments
Length of trial – longer the better
Visiting successful implementations
So – drawing out 3 themes/issues for further discussion tomorrow:
- Cultural buy-in – CMS as a lever for buy in, organisational issues, how do you persuade people to use the CMS and templates…
- Selection – how do you choose one – criteria/cost/institutional support, open source vs commercial
- Implementation – flexibility, platform (infrastructure and supported for end user), accessibility
written by ostephens
\\ tags: IWMW 2005
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Customers, Suppliers and the Need for Partnerships
That was a bit of a mammoth post – don’t know if I can keep that up for the next 2 days!
Anyway, on to talk 2.
First talk I’ve ever been to where we have the number of slides and the expected delivery time put up for our information!
So – starting with Customer focus – some key questions about who our customers are and what they want.
So – the speaker is just describing some ‘dimensions’ of customer server:
Tangibles – physical facilties and equipment
Reliablity
Responsiveness
Assurance – confidence/trust
Empathy
The speaker is now talking about ‘Customer Chains’ – but I’m afraid I’m not really getting to grips with what he means. He has obviously found it a useful way of thinking about the customers and their needs, but so far I don’t understand how it works.
OK – starting to make a bit more sense here – an example for the Academic Staff Publications Catalogue – basically seems to be mapping out a business process that looks at how information was flowing across the organisation from the content owners to the final publication on the web.
This analysis allowed them to think about how they would make it a ‘web first’ publication instead. It all sounds pretty good – but as he has just said – making the change in the work flow – especially changing behaviour of the content owners (academic staff) was incredibly difficult and painful.
In this sense the customer chain tool is not, for me, is not really doing the hard work – in this case, the analysis seems relatively straightforward – it’s how you change the workflow that is the difficult bit.
Just looking at a more complex customer chain – the publishing of the LSE website – perhaps this starts to show why you might do this type of analysis. The ‘customer chain’ way of looking things is simply a way of looking at the problem – essentially it is an analysis of the workflow, packages and people/groups involved in the process.
It might be interesting to compare our own print ‘customer chain’ versus our web ‘customer chain’ – I wonder how different these are – and whether they should be different?
Overall the idea of customer chains seems fine – there are plenty of ways of describing these concepts, and it is really just bringing some discipline to the analysis of your workflows – in this case specifically within publication processes.
A key point now being made – over the last 10 years we have seen the move from the systems being the important thing, and the focus, whereas now the basic technology problems seem to have been solved – so now the processes and people are the important things. This may be obvious but essentially web provision in HE institutions has generally (in my view) grown up around the technical problems and solutions – this movement to concentrating on processes and people is a very slow process.
What is interesting is that this workshop still seems to have an attendance which is predominantly technical – if the above paragraph is true, then shouldn’t we, at this point, be seeing many more people interested in the processes and the people? This is obviously happening some extent – but again, it is something that seems to be happening slowly… (just dropped in on some of the online chat – it is pretty much as geeky as it gets)
OK – some summarising the speaker is saying that the web teams should be at the end of the customer chain – not within the chain. However, not clear what a ‘web team’ is in his view.
2nd speaker – and both have apologized for ‘awful marketing speak/jargon’ – why? Neither have apologized for using ‘tech speak’ – so far xslt, java, cocoon, xml, blogging etc.
Just referencing http://www.effectingchange.luton.ac.uk as a tool kit for helping effect change in HE institutions – sounds interesting.
written by ostephens
\\ tags: IWMW 2005
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Customers, Suppliers and the Need for Partnerships
That was a bit of a mammoth post – don’t know if I can keep that up for the next 2 days!
Anyway, on to talk 2.
First talk I’ve ever been to where we have the number of slides and the expected delivery time put up for our information!
So – starting with Customer focus – some key questions about who our customers are and what they want.
So – the speaker is just describing some ‘dimensions’ of customer server:
Tangibles – physical facilties and equipment
Reliablity
Responsiveness
Assurance – confidence/trust
Empathy
The speaker is now talking about ‘Customer Chains’ – but I’m afraid I’m not really getting to grips with what he means. He has obviously found it a useful way of thinking about the customers and their needs, but so far I don’t understand how it works.
OK – starting to make a bit more sense here – an example for the Academic Staff Publications Catalogue – basically seems to be mapping out a business process that looks at how information was flowing across the organisation from the content owners to the final publication on the web.
This analysis allowed them to think about how they would make it a ‘web first’ publication instead. It all sounds pretty good – but as he has just said – making the change in the work flow – especially changing behaviour of the content owners (academic staff) was incredibly difficult and painful.
In this sense the customer chain tool is not, for me, is not really doing the hard work – in this case, the analysis seems relatively straightforward – it’s how you change the workflow that is the difficult bit.
Just looking at a more complex customer chain – the publishing of the LSE website – perhaps this starts to show why you might do this type of analysis. The ‘customer chain’ way of looking things is simply a way of looking at the problem – essentially it is an analysis of the workflow, packages and people/groups involved in the process.
It might be interesting to compare our own print ‘customer chain’ versus our web ‘customer chain’ – I wonder how different these are – and whether they should be different?
Overall the idea of customer chains seems fine – there are plenty of ways of describing these concepts, and it is really just bringing some discipline to the analysis of your workflows – in this case specifically within publication processes.
A key point now being made – over the last 10 years we have seen the move from the systems being the important thing, and the focus, whereas now the basic technology problems seem to have been solved – so now the processes and people are the important things. This may be obvious but essentially web provision in HE institutions has generally (in my view) grown up around the technical problems and solutions – this movement to concentrating on processes and people is a very slow process.
What is interesting is that this workshop still seems to have an attendance which is predominantly technical – if the above paragraph is true, then shouldn’t we, at this point, be seeing many more people interested in the processes and the people? This is obviously happening some extent – but again, it is something that seems to be happening slowly… (just dropped in on some of the online chat – it is pretty much as geeky as it gets)
OK – some summarising the speaker is saying that the web teams should be at the end of the customer chain – not within the chain. However, not clear what a ‘web team’ is in his view.
2nd speaker – and both have apologized for ‘awful marketing speak/jargon’ – why? Neither have apologized for using ‘tech speak’ – so far xslt, java, cocoon, xml, blogging etc.
Just referencing http://www.effectingchange.luton.ac.uk as a tool kit for helping effect change in HE institutions – sounds interesting.
written by ostephens
\\ tags: IWMW 2005
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