One on One with Lisa Welchman of WelchmanPierpoint

Lisa Welchman is the founding partner at WelchmanPierpoint, a company that helps organizations build and manage large, complex websites. She began her career back in 1996 at Cisco and has been helping build large websites ever since. 10 years ago, she left Cisco and started her own web consulting business. We asked Welchman what made large web sites different and what companies need to do to maintain control of the design and the message.

FCM: What issues are unique to the larger, complex websites you create (beyond the number of pages) that you might not face with a smaller one?

LW: Truly large websites, like truly large numbers, can take on a life of their own. And, you are right, the number of pages is sort of the least of the worries. (In fact, the amount of content being managed is less important than the nature of the content--is it structured and tagged with metadata for instance or just static HTML pages?) The list of concerns that will make management more complex is long and known: Localization, personalization, content security, where, how and with what is content aggregated, records management concerns, etc.

But also key is the structure and nature of the web team in the organization. Large websites usually mean a lot of cooks in the web kitchen whether they are internal web contributors or external vendors creating content and data to support the site. Is this web development effort coordinated? For truly large websites, an uncoordinated web team will almost inevitably mean serious content management problems and lowered site quality. And lastly, for large sites the executive sponsorship of the web is crucial. Large websites in large organizations with no orchestration or high-level direction setting from executives equals a website that looks like a bad mash-up.

FCM: Why is governance an important aspect of website management?

LW: Governance is important because it sets limits and rules for web development and management. Without limits and rules, websites grow chaotically. The policies and standards that spawn from solid web governance provide the referential DNA for sensible web growth. People have a misguided belief that web governance hinders collaboration, but the opposite is true. Standards enable collaboration. Everything that has scaled well has operated on top of a standards framework: The web, blogs, Wikis, etc.

I think people confuse collaboration with freedom to do whatever you want in any form. There’s room for that creative force, particularly at the genesis of a new form (like where the web was 15 years ago). But once you start scaling or replicating, you have to standardize or chaos ensues. For the web that might mean a visual template to control the look and feel of over a million web pages on a single site, or deciding which applications' languages will be used on a site, or what publishing tools will be used to aggregate content, or what meta-data will be used to tag content for re-use or enable better site search. Standards will not hinder you. They will set you free.

FCM: It seems like Marketing has become the manager of websites. Do you think this is a good idea?

LW: A website is a sophisticated software application; it’s also an organizational operational tool and a communications device, among other things. So, while certain aspects of web development, particularly the design and editorial functions are well informed from Marketing, other aspects are best guided by IT (network and service infrastructure) or by actual web experts (IA and web tools). Marketing teams like to think of themselves as web experts on the whole because as a general rule they tend to be more customer focused than, say, IT folks and executives and in their shortsightedness have let this roll. But customer-centricity is not web expertise per se.

Web experts are folks who may have come from a Marketing or IT background, or Records Management or some other arena but who have worked with websites in a serious way for the 10 years or more. By serious, I mean helped develop taxonomies for web delivery, know how to write for the web, understand information architecture for the web, understand how tools like web content management systems interact with metadata and templates, how RSS works, and how to manage content, data and application holistically and deeply. And, neither IT nor Marketing is well positioned in the organization to understand how to create overall organization operational efficiencies via the use of web-based technologies. That's best done at an executive level through an operations management lens.

So, I think websites end up being managed by Marketing because no one else wants to do it. IT gave up the tug of war about 5 years ago. They aren’t interested in the front-facing communications focused aspects that everyone thinks of as the web. It’s too bad because websites need some of the structure and solidity and development rigor that IT has to offer. But in any case, it’s neither IT nor Marketing’s job to manage the web. That’s the job of web experts. Web experts as a group haven’t stepped to the forefront and demanded that their jobs (as a set and a team) be professionalized and differentiated from Marketing and IT functions. I think that’s coming in the next 10 years.

FCM: How can content management systems help a company manage a complex website on the front and back ends?

LW: Content management systems, whether complex or simple, are required to help support content consistency. They are a crucial component of standards enforcement especially when it comes to use of templates, the application of metadata from a controlled vocabulary of terms and, with more sophisticated or customized systems, understanding what is on your website. I’m always surprised how many organizations have websites of 500K+ content objects, hundreds of applications and scores of data feeds but no one in the organization can give the full list of all of these things. Of course, management of all these components is beyond a classical content management system which traditionally has focused on content and left out data and applications. These arenas have separate and usually unequal development and test environments. I’ve been crying about this for over 10 years. It’s an organizational and cultural bias that content, data and applications need to be managed separately. The single faceted nature of a lot of content management systems supports this segregation. I wish we had better tools on the whole for web management. The web is going to force organizations to manage content, data and apps in aggregate. Going forward, I hope that we see the tools to support those efforts.

FCM: What kinds of metrics do you like to use to measure how well a website is meeting a company's goals?

LW: We classify web measurement into three major categories: Web usability, web analytics and strategic business metrics. Usability focuses on measuring the quality of the users experience and mines for potential new needs. Web analytics is giving you data about what is actually happening on the website, the raw data of hits, click stream tracking, conversion to value whether that be fiscal or otherwise. Strategic business metrics are things that web people like to ignore. Strategic business metrics look at how much the organization is spending on the web, how efficient they are at developing for the web and most importantly whether or not an organization is meeting the key performance indicators that have been set by management.

We web people have been spoiled in the past. Because we work with a relatively new technology that management doesn’t really understand, we’ve been able to be innovate and implement without having to prove much real business value. Given the natural maturing of web technology arena, the state of the economy and increased web spending as systems become more sophisticated, organizations will be demanding more proof of value from web professionals. We should be ready.

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