{"id":399,"date":"2005-07-06T18:38:46","date_gmt":"2005-07-07T01:38:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=399"},"modified":"2005-07-06T18:38:46","modified_gmt":"2005-07-07T01:38:46","slug":"parallel-session-a-hey-you-get-offa-my-web-hidden-desires-and-unforeseen-circumstances-in-web-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2005\/07\/parallel-session-a-hey-you-get-offa-my-web-hidden-desires-and-unforeseen-circumstances-in-web-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Parallel Session A &#8211; Hey! You! Get Offa My Web! Hidden Desires and Unforeseen Circumstances in Web Management"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No wireless network up here &#8211; so have to post this later.<\/p>\n<p>So &#8211; first question &#8211; who are we, and who\/what annoys you in relation to the web&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The answer to the first seems to be &#8211; mainly people are from &#8216;web teams&#8217;, but a few marketing people as well &#8211; and to the second &#8211; other people who edit web content &#8211; and think they know better than &#8216;us&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>There are actually quite a variety of &#8216;gripes&#8217; coming out:<br \/>\nContent producers &#8211; getting content and getting appropriate content<br \/>\nTechies &#8216;fiddling&#8217;<br \/>\n&#8216;rogue&#8217; web authors<br \/>\nMarketing department<br \/>\nImposed &#8216;systems&#8217;<br \/>\nLack of support\/investment from &#8216;senior management&#8217;<br \/>\nUnrealistic expectation of content producer<br \/>\nLack of communication<\/p>\n<p>So &#8211; basically everyone is an expert and feels that they should &#8216;own&#8217; the web presence.<\/p>\n<p>The first question for me is &#8211; why is the &#8216;web&#8217; regarded as a single thing? We don&#8217;t talk about &#8216;print&#8217; and expect one owner etc. &#8211; or do we?<\/p>\n<p>Onto a case study &#8211; the launch of a staff portal &#8211; which will:<br \/>\nManage HR Records<br \/>\nManage publications<br \/>\nManage research administration<br \/>\nProduce automatic staff web profiles (for external facing website)<\/p>\n<p>The stakeholders were:<br \/>\nCoporate systems \/ portal team<br \/>\nWeb team (mostly external facing web sites, provision of tools etc to web publishers)<br \/>\nAcademic IT Services<br \/>\nAdmin depts: HR, Finance, etc.<br \/>\nManagement<\/p>\n<p>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).<\/p>\n<p>Now into a group exercise &#8211; I&#8217;m in group &#8216;C&#8217; (whoo hoo).  The &#8216;break out&#8217; room is a lot more comfortable than the presentation room &#8211; comfy sofas.<\/p>\n<p>So &#8211; a number of tasks &#8211; we are acting as the &#8216;web team&#8217; &#8211; and have novelty pirate hats (to lighten the tone apparently)<\/p>\n<p>We now have to negotiate with the &#8216;marketing team&#8217; and then present to &#8216;senior management&#8217; about the solution we have up with.<\/p>\n<p>So &#8211; basically we presented to Senior Management the following points:<br \/>\nFirstly &#8211; market research &#8211; both teams agreed&#8230; Objective research on what the end user wants<br \/>\nPilot for overall standard of web content across institution<br \/>\nSuggestion to Senior Management for financial support<br \/>\nContent &#8211; generation etc. ease of updating.<br \/>\nWork together for central strategy<\/p>\n<p>Interestingly in our group, we came to this kind of compromise &#8211; making an argument for an institutional strategy. The other group actually seemed to be a bit dominated by the web team &#8211; with marketing paying out &pound;12,000 for the web team to do the work &#8211; and were looking at the very specific outcomes.<\/p>\n<p>OK &#8211; so it all ended up being a bit of a love-in &#8211; in reality there are lots of other factors &#8211; history, personality, refusal to engage etc. Also, the question for our group is what happens if the &#8216;senior management&#8217; team actually don&#8217;t have the political will to go through with trying to establish a corporate web presence?<\/p>\n<p>The case study presented in the session seems to hinge quite a bit on &#8216;management&#8217; saying that &#8216;this is going to happen&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No wireless network up here &#8211; so have to post this later. So &#8211; first question &#8211; who are we, and who\/what annoys you in relation to the web&#8230; The answer to the first seems to be &#8211; mainly people are from &#8216;web teams&#8217;, but a few marketing people as well &#8211; and to the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-iwmw-2005"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}