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Jonathan Kahn: Effective Interaction Designers Change Organisations from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Slides

As part of a series of interviews with presenters at the upcoming Together London Masterclasses, May 3-4 2012, I interviewed Lisa Welchman about implementing web governance, enabling collaboration and cross-functional working in organisations, and developing your career as a web manager. If you like this interview, don’t miss Lisa’s masterclass on 4 May in London–tickets are still available.

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Jonathan Kahn: I’m talking to Lisa Welchman who’s an expert in web governance. Lisa, you’re a consultant. You work with organizations to establish web governance. My question is how have these organizations managed up until now without understanding how to use web governance? What causes them to come and talk to you and ask you for help? Where does this kind of start?

Lisa Welchman: Well, I think the first thing I would say is organizations haven’t managed without web governance up until now. Any organization has some form of web governance in play. Now, whether or not it’s effective or not is a different story. Web governance doesn’t necessarily mean putting things in a strait jacket. It just means understanding who’s accountable for establishing policies and standards inside the organization and how loose how you’re going to be about compliance to those things. Most people have some paradigm that they’re using, even if it’s kind of ad hoc or not. What gets people thinking that they have a web governance problem is usually something practical. They’re trying to achieve something across the entire site, and they’re realizing that they can’t do it either because they can’t get all of the stakeholders to line up and either implement the same design, or use the same technology platform.

Jonathan: You’re saying they do have governance, but it’s not sufficient that they would actually have any, the web team would have any authority over what’s really going to happen…

Lisa: Yeah, I mean for the Digital Governance Journal, which is an online journal, Graham Oaks recently wrote an article that we’re getting ready to put up. One of the things that he talks about is how, you know, one method of web governance is anarchy. [laughs] It may not be the one that you want, but it actually is a form of governance. It kind of exists as it is, it’s usually just not adequate, and that’s what people are realizing. All of this stems from kind of the organic nature of the web and how everyone adopted it inside an organization. It really wasn’t a strategic decision to adopt the web. People kind of stumbled upon it, and then implemented it incrementally over the last 10 to 15 years. They really didn’t have a moment where they stopped and said, “Hey, we’d really like to figure out how to govern this.”

Jonathan: When people come to you, are they actually saying, “I’m trying to get my specific project done and governance is a problem for that. Can you just come and help me launch my campaign or whatever it is?” Is it some short term thing like that? Are they actually saying, “I want you to sort this out on a sort of medium term viewpoint.”?

Lisa: It’s really all of the above. There are reasons why people… Frequently it’s something like, “We tried to do a redesign over and over again and we can’t get everyone on board. Where we’re trying to implement at WCM system, and we’re trying to get, and this unit over here doesn’t want to use it.” There’s also kind of this growing contingent of folks that are just calling kind of throwing their hands and saying, “It’s just a mess.” It’s clear that we’ve got all of this content and all of these applications on a server. In some instances, they don’t even know what they have. No one’s taken anything down for years and years and years, so they know that they have a quality problem, and that it may be causing some risks for the organization, and certainly might be causing issues with search, find-ability, and things like that.

How that looks for the organization is going to depend on the management style, the mission of the organization, the culture of the organization. Those are things that people are really thinking about a lot.

Jonathan: You could talk about governance forever in a way. You could talk about any level of time frame when you’re talking about governance. When people are coming to you and saying, “We have a problem with our implementation of whatever, content management system.” What type of timescale are you able to engage with them? Do you kind of just, do you set off processes that continue when you leave? What’s the kind of time frame for the work you’re doing with them?

Lisa: This is a permanent operational solution. As I mentioned before, it’s not that they’re not governing, it’s that they’re not governing well. Very few organizations as I mentioned are anarchy before, but very few organizations have a paradigm where people are just allowed to do what they want and put whatever they want on the server. There’s some type of governing mechanism. It just lacks clarity. That’s any kind of first cause omnipresent thing inside the organization. All I’m doing when I work with people is tweaking it, and tuning it so it works the way it needs to work inside that organization so it’s effective. People have governance, it’s just not effective.

I really think of myself as a very small change agent. This isn’t some big over processed type of thing that we’re trying to install in an organization. It really is about tuning. If you approach it as, “We’re going to just re engineer this whole thing,” you probably won’t succeed, because if you can’t redesign your website, you probably can’t really redesign the web organization that effectively either.

Usually there’s a lot going right. It doesn’t really require that kind of massive overhaul.

Jonathan: OK. One of the things that web professionals always seem to have trouble with is siloed thinking and turf wars within organizations where you have historic departments which own things like marketing, technology, or sales, or customer support, and they’re used to working in their siloed, individual areas where they do their thing very, very well. They never really used to have to work so closely with all of these different departments. This must be something that comes up when you talk about governance. How do you deal with that type of problem?

Lisa: I express it less as a problem. It’s sort of a state of affairs, right?

Jonathan: Situation.

Lisa: Yeah. If you’re going to have any organization of any size, it will specialize and compartmentalize and turn into silos. In a lot of different ways, we leverage that expertise and that specialization. We want to know where are the visual experts, and where the application development experts when we need them? It’s the collaboration piece that’s really difficult. Websites in particular instigate and amplify an organization’s ability to… Well, I should say instigate. It amplifies the state that that organization is in when it comes to collaboration. If you don’t collaborate, you can really see it on a website, right? That you don’t know how to collaborate. It’s really figuring out how to streamline those touch points. There are a lot of different ways to handle that and overcome that.

I think that makes sense for them. I am a proponent of kind of the standalone digital team, but a lot of organizations kind of can’t wrap their heads around creating a separate entity that has you know, marketing, communications, content strategy, user experience people in the same group with IT people. There’s just this kind of cultural rift where people think they can’t exist together.

That’s a little bit kind of old school shallow thinking, because this group is creating the probably largest organizational artifact, which is its digital presence.

Jonathan: You’re saying this case study, you’re saying the department that used to be IT is now going to contain all of these different professionals, but that sounds to me like cross-functional working. That’s not what traditionally used to be IT.

Lisa: That’s right. Labels are labels. I don’t really care about that. I will pick up anyone and move them anywhere where I think we’re going to get a better quality digital presence, or we’re going to be able to enable stronger collaboration. This particular organization has a lot of applications that they’ve developed, and part of the problem is that they work well, but they look really bad. The user experience is… They’ve got competent people who can do the day to day maintenance of the content in the communications areas and the other business units. That part’s really great. The real part is “Can we get a good framework of user experience and content strategy around and embedded in this application development piece of it?” The other people are actually kind of engineered to care about those things. They’re much better.

Jonathan: This is reminding me of the… Are you familiar with “The Lean Start-Up” by Eric Ries, which is mainly about cross-functional, it’s about the move to cross-functional teams at the end of the industrial era. Is there some link between… This is happening like across the board, as you say, there’s lots of content people who are unhappy with Agile, which is normally where an IT department says, “We’re going to work in this non-linear way, iterative way.” Then the writers have a problem with that, which might be due to the fact that the developers are interpreting Agile in a very kind of narrow engineering-y way when it’s actually about not specializing in anything, but kind of being open to wherever this thing might go and kind of letting go of always knowing where you’re going. That kind of stuff.

Lisa: That’s an interesting question. I wish that I saw the death of Waterfall, but the reality is in a lot of large organizations, I don’t see the death of Waterfall. They talk about it, almost every business process, an deep business processes including the way people are paid, and so that that reward structure and all of this stuff is tied into this kind of long-winded project management methodology. It’s just a lot to untie that in organizations, which is why I think some business will fail rather than change, because it’s really hard to make that type of transformation.

Jonathan: Can you talk to me about that? This question of, organizations will fail rather than change. You look at an organization today, and you can’t tell really which one it’s going to be. How do you approach that particular issue of “Will this organization fail or will it change?”

Lisa: That’s a huge question. I think, off the top of my head without too much deep reflection, I would say the one thing that I would look at in that arena has to do with an emphasis on measurement, and managing to measurement. It’s really hard to, you can always make numbers look whatever way you want to make them look, but the numbers, generally speaking, don’t lie. If you’re actually linking your business objectives to these quantifiable measures that are there, and you’re managing to that, then I think you’re less likely to fail. It’s when you have a very kind of… There’s some sophistry around the numbers, especially when it comes to websites.

Too digital are actually more likely to succeed, and this is just anecdotally from my experience. That’s almost no one though, because a lot of large organizations one, may be floating on a lot of cash. They’re not really that concerned, and the transformation that is digital is really slow in impacting them, at the moment. The obvious ones, anyone who slings information for a living or content for information has been impacted heavily.

If you’re a newspaper, if you’re a magazine, that sort of thing, but if you’re a traditional manufacturer that makes a physical entity and distributes it, you may have some maturity in the area of extranets and information flow and managing your relationships, B2B type relationships in the organization. The core of your business hasn’t changed yet.

Jonathan: That has to do with the maturity issue. If you look at sort of retail or something, you’ve got Amazon, so people who are head to head with Amazon, completely scared about the Internet. You look at say, food or something, and there’s like, none of that’s really happened yet. This kind of runs into my next question. You’ve written some stuff on your blog about web managers and how their role is going to change. What’s your advice when web managers come to you and, there’s question of, “Do we need to improve our business skills, become more mature, talk about the business case, etc.?” How do you advise people in terms of this question about are they in the right place? Types of tactics that people might use to try and explain why what they think should happen makes sense for the business.

Lisa: Sure. The first thing is to make sure that you’re educated about your business. I’m going to be critical, because I can be, but also because I think it’s important, web people are always complaining about how executives don’t understand digital. What’s left in the room is that frequently, web folks don’t get business. They really holistically don’t understand the business model. They can have a very simplistic way of looking at it and saying, “Look, we could increase sales by XXX percent if we just do this!” There’s like these really quick types of metrics without really functionally understanding what that sort of transformation means inside the organization. Not because they’re not bright, they may well be bright about that activity, but they may not understand what it’s going to take to turn that ship 40 degrees to go in this other direction.

You really need to understand the business, and that’s really important for large, legacy types of organizations like say a university, or you know, these big B2B companies where you know, the mission’s heavily impacted in the university side by the dissemination of information. There’s a big kind of bureaucratic churn to it, right? It takes skill to actually get through that.

Is that good? No, objectively not. It shouldn’t be that way. People should move more quickly, but historically, this is what happens. Organizations start out lean and light, and then get bigger and grow and then they slow down. We even see this in our big companies, like in the Googles and the Facebooks of the world, they’re having their growing pains as well. There’s something interesting in that dynamic where things grow.

I really think the idea of letting someone mentor you and understanding that you don’t know everything about a business, I think there’s a huge amount of opportunity for people who have been in digital for 10 or 15 years to really be moving up this organizational food chain so that we are creating senior managers and executives who are very digitally savvy.

Jonathan: Do you have any stories of like, people you’ve known or you’ve been aware of who have kind of made that transition or started doing the transition from web professional focused on the doing to… Sorry, go ahead.

Lisa: Sure. I would probably say maybe, I’m guessing here. Maybe 25, I’ll guess low. Twenty-five percent of the folks that I work with, almost all of them are primed for it, but 25 percent manage to make that leap, or to make the case of why they need a more senior digital person inside the organization. Sometimes that person’s calling me on the phone to begin with. “I’m VP of Interactive” or something like that, that’s like, “Woo hoo!” That sort of thing. That person’s already there. Frequently, it’s a web manager who knows the right way to do things, but is just embedded down in that web ghetto. They’re really trying to interact with various folks and get the attention of senior executives. Sometimes they just don’t have the chops. It’s not what they’re saying or what they know, it’s just they don’t know how to do that. It’s like, they don’t know how to use that language.

Jonathan: Sure. It’s a skills thing. You have seen several, lots of people actually, make this transition. If there are people out there who are thinking “It’s time for me to do something,” you’re saying this is actually possible to do if you get the right help and if you’re in the right place.

Lisa: Right. A web governance type project, I mean not to toot my own horn, even doing it on your own without outside help is a really good way to do that, because it deals with risk mitigation. You know, that’s something that executives really care about, or creating opportunity for the organization, or making it easy for opportunity to be taken advantage of in the organization. If you are working on a web governance framework or trying to create one for your organization, you’ll get to be able to deliver these strategic messages to these executives. You’ll have some questions that you can’t answer, so it will give you an opportunity to get some face time with them.

Jonathan: Start a web governance project of some type.

Lisa: Right, and raise it as an issue. It doesn’t even have to be heavy-handed, instead of just… This is what I generally see happening. I see a lot of web people that are kind of sitting back complaining and pounding on the table saying, “Why won’t people follow our standards? We know what the best design is. We know what the content should be like. We know what apps we should be developing and what platform. Why don’t people just do what I say?” Then they kind of sit there and gripe, right? All day long. That doesn’t look very manager-y, right? That’s not the way to get something done. Flip that into, “You know, I think we have a problem collaborating.” If you don’t want to say the governance word, right? “I think we have a problem collaborating, and it’s not really clear who gets to make decisions about digital around here. I think I’ve got an idea about how that could work.”

Lots of times people try to talk about governance in the middle of a project that people are all heated about, and then you want to kind of slap down these rules and regulations. That’s really not the best time to do it. The best time to do it is absent a project. You can say, “Hey, look. Let’s just step back and look at this a little bit from a little bit of a higher level.” If you’re doing that type of work and offering that to your organization in a competent way, it’s a leadership quality to step forward that way.

I think that can create a lot of opportunity for folks who are interested in management and want to move forward. Those who don’t can still be you know, very senior individual contributors. That’s great too. Not everybody has to want to do that.

Jonathan: Fantastic. On the slightly larger scale, have you got any stories you can share or case studies of organizations who have had some type of significant digital challenge who have made some real measurable progress by going through a kind of web governance type process?

Lisa: Sure. There’s an example that I use a lot and that I can name because their site’s live and it’s the government is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. They have a classic, I mean, I’m not a user experience person so I’m not talking about the quality of the site, but they had a classic problem a few years with you know, they have multiple divisions inside the Food and Drug Administration that focus on different aspects. Each area had their own look and feel. There was a lot of challenge. They wanted to unify folks, not only on a single WCM platform, but also a unified look and feel. That was kind of the impetus for the governance project, and they realized in play, and trying to get this done, that they really couldn’t line people together. We worked with them to actually create this cross-functional team that could talk about standards and put mechanisms in place to figure out who gets to make decisions about certain aspects of web development.

I mean I wouldn’t recommend anybody to do all those things at once.

Jonathan: Sure.

Lisa: But, they actually managed to successfully get that done. So, whether you like the FDA.gov site or not, it’s one case. But, they were able to successfully unify that and keep that up and running and come up with a kind of handbook of how we do the web here at the FDA. So, I thought that was really one of those projects that I was proud of. A lot of times we do web governance work for people, and it’s very difficult to see the effect, right?

Jonathan: Right.

Lisa: If people don’t actually have projects that are associated with it that you can actually visually see it….

Jonathan: So, how do they measure their success internally for that?

Lisa: Yes, I was going to say it’s kind of hard and soft, right. I’m a metrics girl that a lot of it should just be, it should just be easier to work. Right, so one of the…I know it sounds crazy, but one of the bad things about not having effective governance is it’s just really hard, right. You have more meetings where you’re arguing about things than you are actually…

Jonathan: People talk about spinning their wheels a lot.

Lisa: Yes, yes. So that, I mean, that’s really hard to measure. No one sits around and says like how many meetings did you have about this user interface, right? No one’s counting that sort of thing and then afterwards saying, after the fact saying, “Oh, wow. We only had one instead of 16.” But, I think everyone who works in digital inside an organization would know what I’m talking about. It’s just this head counting against the law, spinning quality of trying to get the simplest of things done, right?

Jonathan: Sure.

Lisa: Or, a classic one is IT creates an application and it looks absolutely horrible and the interface folks don’t find out about it until two weeks before the thing deploys, right. So, those sorts of things should stop, right, and you should be able to think more strategically about that.

Jonathan: You should be able to somehow manifest the business value, really, shouldn’t you?

Lisa: Yes, and it should just be easier to work. So, I mean, one of the outputs…I mean, I think the end of the line output of a mature approach to governance is you kind of have a body of standards, your own internal W3C, right, of how you all do web digital, mobile, social, whatever you want to call it inside the organization. So, you’ve kind of got this gospel that the people follow. It might be a lot of rules. It might be a little bit of rules. Again, that’s cultural. It doesn’t mean a whole…that doesn’t necessarily mean a whole bunch. But, it’s very clear about what certain guidelines are like a user interface, right, or application user interface, if you want to be very specific about that.

OK, that can be a problem but usually it’s a problem because no one actually said they had to ever, right. No one ever said, “This group over here is responsible for creating all the digital interface standards for whatever this organization produces. And, you are accountable for following these standards. And if you don’t, there are consequences.”

Jonathan: Right. And also there’s a reason why because it concerns…so often it’s like, “This is our thing. We own it and we feel it has to be this way,” without any actual why does this matter to the organization or to risk or to our success or whatever it is.

Lisa: Well, yes. I mean, when we write standards for people and I think this is an important point to draw out because anyone can do this in their own time. One of the things that’s part of every standard is the rationale, right?

Jonathan: Right.

Lisa: So, it’s not just…so people are online looking at their online standards and clicking through things. It’s not just, “Do this because we said so,” although sometimes people can take that attitude and it’s not our fault, right. We’re the experts and we know. It’s like that’s really not a good enough reason, right?

Jonathan: Exactly.

Lisa: It has to be why this adds business value. And so, we insist that people have a rationale for every standard that they have. It makes them think about it. You’d be surprised how many standards fall that the web team’s actually articulating fall because they realized, “Wait, there’s really not a reason why it has to be like this.”

Jonathan: Right. We’re not actually used to working in that way. We much more like this is how we’ve read it. It should be done. And it’s like, “Well, have you thought about the specific context here now and in the context of this business?” None of us are really used to working in that way, I think.

Lisa: Yes. I just got back from a trip where I was meeting with some people and someone was really adamant about social media. And they were very immature for not early adopting when it comes to social software inside this organization. And they were kind of pounding their fists on the table, not literally but figuratively and saying that the train’s left the station. The bus has left the depot. Whatever it is they said and we missed it, right. And like some people really want to do it. And what was happening is that people who were writing a policy were being very careful about how they articulated what was OK to do with social.

“You’ve missed the boat when you can’t make money because you’re not doing something or you can’t whatever.” I mean, there may be competitors who are doing other things but it would be really useful sometime for web folks to kind of turn off the histrionics behind early adoption. It is…

Jonathan: Right because it’s fine to say, “You guys haven’t seen how relevant this stuff that’s happening outside the company is to the company.” That’s why people are saying, in addition to that, we have to then say how much of our ways that we like to work are ignoring other realities. Or, for example, this organization’s been around for 50 years and can’t just like change as fast as a new start up or whatever it is. So, I think that’s part of the process.

Lisa: Yes and sometimes that means that, that 50-year-old company might go out of business, right. So, it’s not like…which is not what anybody would want, right. But, that’s also and this is, maybe, a little more philosophical and sensible from a business perspective, but that’s just how it goes, right. Two businesses come in and out and things, dynamics change.

Jonathan: And I think the other thing is web professionals, although some of them don’t seem to, wouldn’t agree, I think we have the freedom to like decide where we work and which gigs we’ll take.

Lisa: Yes.

Jonathan: And so if this organization is not appreciating you and you’ve done your best to explain what’s really going on and how obvious stuff could help them. And they sort of want it then, and you can’t see any self development within the organization, then you do have the opportunity to then find something else to do.

Lisa: Yes, that’s true but that’s hard inside an organization where the average tenure is 20 years, right?

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Lisa: And so that’s part of what you were alluding to before which is that’s all changing and it’s not really shored up. What is it going to look like? I mean, people who are beginning their careers now, what’s that life cycle going to look like when they’re retiring? To be honest, I have absolutely no idea at all.

Jonathan: Yes, exactly. So, Lisa, you’re coming to London on May 4th to give a masterclass called Web Governance for Your Organization. And so, we’re excited to have you. So, first of all, who should come to this master class?

Lisa: Well, I think the primary audiences are really folks who are in this central web team inside an organization or the head, key web manager, or, if you’re larger, someone who is responsible for standards and creation of standards inside the organization, and I think this is really important, wants to solve this problem, right. So, there’s always someone inside the organization who is very passionate about getting this done and realizes how much risk and wasted effort is going on around web development and kind of wants to carry this torch in the organization. So, I really think that this would be a good session for them.

I mean, that’s really a balancing act as well. And so just a lot of that over the last 10 or 15 years I’ve been doing this of what works and what doesn’t.

Jonathan: So, what will attendees coming out of this master class be able to do that they couldn’t do before?

Lisa: I mean, they will be able to tune their on web governance framework. That’s my take. Whenever I give these workshops is that they don’t have to call me, right.

Jonathan: [laughs]

Lisa: Well, I mean, part of it is identifying. You can’t fix everything, right?

Jonathan: Sure.

Lisa: I mean, just in life and anything, you can’t fix everything. Being able to identify what are those things that are really causing problems and being able to point to them and tune them as well as being able to understand how to make this argument upwards so that you can get a little bit more sponsorship and support and seriousness about digital and collaboration.

Jonathan: Fantastic. And so can you share any…you’ve done a lot of these master classes over the years. Can you show any kind of success stories of someone who’s come to one of your master classes and had some positive outcome out of it?

Lisa: Sure, I mean, the thing that usually happens the most or the story that I’ve heard the most out of master classes are folks who come in and then they go back and lots of times they get some sort of promotion. Now, whether or not this means more money, I’m not really sure. But usually they go back and they find a way to espouse this information into a way that is coherent for their organization. And they’re able to sell this story inside the organization and get themselves raised to that level. In a lot of instances, this is just unaddressed, right?

Jonathan: Yes.

Lisa: So it’s not as if you’re fighting with somebody over this power. Tactically, you might be fighting with someone over what does a web page look like. But usually there’s no one else who’s trying to rant about “I want to run all digital,” right?

Jonathan: [laughs]

Lisa: And so, usually, you can find a way to make yourself more senior. But then you have to be careful because if you really are content being an individual contributor, that’s something you’re going to have to give up if turn into the management right. So, that’s not necessarily the only type of success story. But, that’s one that I see a lot where they’re actually able to implement this web governance framework inside the organization, and at least streamline some things. It is a process. So, what you want to get out of this is a really quick fix, right?

Jonathan: Sure.

Lisa: So, this is a process. Usually, it’s going to take anywhere from a year to two to three years to actually smooth it all out. There’s a lot of policy to look at. There’s a lot of standards to write over time and there’s a lot of relationships to build and trust to build. And you work at it to build throughout the organization. So, the process to implementing a web governance framework may come. Defining it can only take a few months, right. So, you’ll be able to walk out and know how to define your own web governance framework and determine what level of control or not control works in your organization. And I can give folks a lot of insight on what they expect to see down the line as they implement things, right, because there are some traditional challenges that come up that people have to navigate.

Jonathan: Fantastic. Well, we’re really looking forward to seeing you at that master class. I know it’s going to be fantastic. And thank you for this discussion which, I think, has been really interesting.

Lisa: Thanks, Jonathan.

Jonathan: See you soon.

Lisa: OK. Bye-bye.

Don’t miss the masterclass

If you enjoyed this interview, don’t miss Lisa’s masterclass on 4 May in London–tickets are still available.

As part of a series of interviews with presenters at the upcoming Together London Masterclasses, May 3-4 2012, I interviewed Randall Snare and Laurence Veale from iQ Content in Dublin about mobile strategy, responsive design, and adaptive content. If you like this interview, don’t miss Randall and Laurence’s masterclass on 4 May in London–tickets are still available.

At iQ Content, how long have clients been asking for mobile websites and apps, in addition to desktop websites?

LV: The last year has seen a massive change so it’s really been the last 12-18 months. They know they need to be mobile, but they’re not sure what the next step is. Should we have an app or a mobile website? So the strategy piece is one that is most needed.

Are your clients aware of the concept of responsive design yet?

LV: That depends, the more technical clients would be, but it’s the same question as we had a couple of years ago regarding web standards. Unless we spell out the benefits of responsive design upfront, then the concept remains just that.

How has the rise of mobile changed the type of work you do, and the processes you need to use?

LV: It complements the existing work we do and most of our process remains the same – i.e. user centred design being one example. So we’re not designing for mobiles, we’re designing for people who use mobiles amongst other things. One thing that I suppose we do more of is rapid prototyping, to get a real feel for how the app or mobile site or responsive design will behave. However, it does add time in terms of designing for “breakpoints” and testing on a host of different devices. Just because it’s a small screen, doesn’t make it easy.

How has the rise of mobile changed clients’ content needs, and how has that changed your work?

RS: I don’t think mobile has changed clients’ content needs; rather, I think mobile has illuminated content problems. There are still very few companies with an on staff web copywriter, and that means content is not suited for the web. That becomes even more obvious on a smaller screen.

I don’t think corporations don’t know this; I think they don’t yet have the resources to have this one web utopia we designers love to talk about. We’re used to working under constraints (i.e. reality) and can recommend the mobile strategy that works in a particular situation, which is usually in the absence of a major UX team behind a digital presence.

Where does a responsive website or app fit within an organisation?

LV: It has to fit within an overall strategy, that’s the first thing and either or both approaches need to be weighed up against objectives, user needs, technical infrastructure, internal team skills and a host of other considerations.

How do you talk about the idea of mobile strategy with clients?

LV: In lots of ways. I sometimes use analytics to demonstrate how mobile users aren’t having as positive an experience as the desktop users (even though analytics can be skewed in favour of smartphones over feature phones). Then we can talk about channels, if you’re doing this for desktop, then you need to think about mobile and then there’s the concept of “one web” – there isn’t a mobile web and a desktop web, there’s just the web, and by creating walls between the two, you could be creating obstacles down the road.

What operational changes do the organisations you come across need to make to successfully implement a mobile strategy?

LV: This sounds boring, but they need to look at a few things in terms of governance and structure.

1. Does mobile fit in with web or digital or is it separate?
2. How do I factor in creating 2, 3, 4 designs when I could have got away with just one before? This means changes to process and workflow. A good example is the adoption of a “mobile first” approach – which forces focus on just the stuff that matters most (they should have been doing this anyway).
3. Budget: Do I need to allocate additional budget for design, and for testing on a whole suite of different devices?
4. Skills: do I have the necessary skills in-house?

What link do you see between content strategy and mobile strategy?

RS: The proliferation of reading platforms has changed publishing. And that’s a combination of content strategy and technology. A lot of the content conversations I’m having now are less about copy and more about how we can get system x and system y to talk to each other or how we can make content granular enough so that there’s an automation in publication. Really that means you can’t talk about content unless you’re talking about the people responsible for it. So, technology = people. The robot revolution is sneaky.

How do you create a mobile strategy that’s sustainable over the medium term—past launch day, that is?

LV: Well, it needs to be flexible to allow for pretty rapid change. The latest iPad and what it does for lower res images on the web is a good example.

You’re leading a masterclass in London called “Mobile content: implementing a mobile strategy”. Who would benefit from attending?

RS: EVERYONE. Particularly people who are in charge of anything web for their company. It’s less about mobile and more about your audience: where they are and what they’re using. If you care about that, then you’d benefit from the workshop.

What will attendees come out of the masterclass being able to do, that they couldn’t do before?

RS: They’ll be able to speak the language of mobile. Some of the terms in mobile, I think, are purposefully ambiguous, and not in an art house way. They’ll be comfortable in the technological solutions that should start at the strategic level. They’ll also be adept at adaptable content, the content that is the link between their company and their customers. Finally, they’ll have a framework in which to create a mobile strategy that complements their business.

Randall on video

Here’s Randall presenting “Content and Creativity” at the London Content Strategy Meetup in March.

Randall Snare: Content and Creativity from Together London on Vimeo.

Don’t miss the masterclass

If you enjoyed this interview, don’t miss Randall and Laurence’s masterclass on 4 May in London–tickets are still available.

As part of a series of interviews with presenters at the upcoming Together London Masterclasses, May 3-4 2012, I interviewed Martin Belam about the value of organising community events, the career benefits of blogging, and the challenges of adapting content to different sized devices. If you like this interview, don’t miss Martin’s masterclass on 3 May in London–tickets are still available.

Why do you put time into organising community events like London IA?

When I was entering the profession I was very lucky that I had good support from where I worked, and I was also sent to speak at events. That meant that I got exposed to a lot of networking and knowledge-sharing, and got to listen to lots of amazing talks that expanded my ideas of what product management, user experience and information architecture could be. I really valued that, and I like to think that events like London IA help people make those first steps in the profession. For students and junior practitioners, events like London IA offer a chance–if you can get a ticket–to see two quality speakers without having to find the cash to go to a big set-piece event.

What have you learnt from organising London IA (and other events)?

That organising events is hard! For London IA we’ve benefitted from having a stable sponsor in Zebra People and a stable host in SenseWorldwide for some time. Ticketing is a constant headache–there are never enough spaces, but we are really committed to keeping the events small and intimate, and free.

You worked in Greece for a few years. How does working in London compare?

I loved working in Greece, although internet penetration there is low and connectivity is poor–certainly where I lived. I ended up dividing a lot of my work between what could be done online, and what could done offline, and doing the online part in internet cafes and bars with wifi. At home I had 28k dial-up access – it was like trying to pretend it was 1997 in 2007. I think that experience of working in busy public spaces has helped erode my concentration span when I’m in an office environment. I still find I like to get my head down and do sketching or writing out of the office. Being based in Kings Place with the Guardian I’ve used the British Library and the Wellcome Centre a lot as remote offices. The Barbican and South Bank Centre are also good places to work with a buzz around you.

The biggest difference with London though is the ability to go to lots of events in the evening. I always advise people coming into the profession to take advantage of that, and to go to as many meet-ups like London IA or the CS meetup or the UPA as possible.

How has writing a regular blog changed your work and how has it affected you career?

I think the blog has mostly been beneficial to my career. Certainly there was a period when I blogged relentlessly about the shortcomings of UK newspaper websites, and became considered an authority on it to the point where one of them hired me. It was very helpful in getting people to notice me and my work whilst I was abroad and freelancing. I might not have given it such a silly name if I’d realised how important it would be.

I believe that writing regularly helps you organise your thoughts–I try to be disciplined about my writing, and I think that makes me more disciplined in other areas of my life. I have a whiteboard in the kitchen where I keep notes of topics I’m planning to write about, and deadlines for presentations, articles, workshops, ebooks and the like. It keeps them all in the forefront of my mind.

A drawback, of course, has been when I’ve worked at places that haven’t been so open to having staff blog about their work. That can feel a bit stifling. I’m at a point in my career now where I presume that anybody who hires me realises that I do have a high profile blog and that is part of what I am about.

You write, “as information architects we’ve had nearly twenty years learning about what works and what doesn’t work on large-scale websites.” How has the rise of mobile platforms and devices changed the practice of IA?

For me the message is to find even more understanding about the context of use, and the best way to present information in an appropriate way. The best products are going to be those that deliver answers and solve problems for users at the moment that they need them on their “tiny mobile computers”–I think phones/tablets/retro-digital-watches-with-wifi fit into that “tiny mobile computer” space.

How do you see IA working with both responsive web design and content strategy to create sustainable user experiences?

The seemingly endless turf war between job titles and disciplines in our area of work disinterests me. I want to produce the best possible product for end users. One that marries a user goal to a business goal. For me IA is crucial to that–whether it’s about organising the information on screen, or organising information during production.

How does your job as an IA relate to organisational change?

I don’t know whether it is the IA part of my job that relates to organisational change, but for most of my career I’ve ended up in the digital outpost of an older company trying to cope with the transformation and disruption that technology is bringing to their business. IA is a useful tool, though, in demonstrating that the kind of constraints that old organisational structures and hierarchies put on information that mean little or nothing to the end user. I think a key aspect is that you always want to test and validate an information architecture scheme with end users, which helps drive user-centred design into a business.

You mentioned in your CS Forum talk that the Guardian’s CMS isn’t locked down, so in theory any user could update the home page, although they’d lose their job in the morning. Does this indicate a more mature attitude to governance than the traditional locked-down IT approach, and is there anything we can learn from it?

I wonder if it is more of an example of taking an agile approach to development. At every stage of building the CMS, faced with the choice of delivering something of value to the end user or of value to the content production team or delivering some workflow security, then training and trust for workflow seemed to be the faster cheaper option. There are some restrictions on what people can do, but eventually you have to make a decision about whether you try and use technology to prevent bad behaviour, or trust your staff not to indulge in bad behaviour.

What do you mean by “responsive IA”?

By “responsive IA” I mean to understand the best way to present information in the context of use and in the context of the device being used.

How does CMS design need to change to enable responsive IA?

I think the CMS approach is very interesting here. I’ve long argued that a good content management system for the end user is often a content authoring tool, not a management tool at all, and I hate presenting users with things that essentially look like a view onto a database. If, however, you are thinking about structuring your content more rigidly to provide differing views depending on the device your user has chosen, you are going to probably need more structure.

You’re leading a masterclass in May called “Responsive information architecture”. Who should come to the masterclass?

I think anyone who is likely to be working on a responsive design project in the near future would benefit, whether they are specifically IAs, UX people, product managers or product owners.

What will attendees come out of the masterclass being able to that they couldn’t do before?

I really want to tackle the underlying structure of information that we present to people. When faced with a small screen it is really easy to strip a design back to a few headlines or links, a tiny logo, and a little bit of navigation. It is easy to decide that you need the user to login to an app, and present them with a tiny facet of the information available based on that login. To me though, the biggest question is this–once you’ve designed a great experience for a small screen, how do you decide what extra information people need as their screen gets bigger? How do you ensure you aren’t just filling up screen real estate rather than adding value for the user? And how do you justify and measure those decisions? It is a fascinating challenge, and one I hope people will enjoy spending a day examining it with me.

Don’t miss the masterclass

If you enjoyed this interview, don’t miss Martin’s masterclass on 3 May in London–tickets are still available.

As part of a series of interviews with presenters at the upcoming Together London Masterclasses, May 3-4 2012, I interviewed Gerry McGovern about grown-up web metrics, organisational change for web management, customer centric thinking, and his “top task management” approach. If you like this interview, don’t miss Gerry’s masterclass on 3 May in London–tickets are still available.

What experiences led you to the Top Task Management approach?

People come to websites to do. That’s what makes the Web so different from other media. They don’t want to be communicated at or marketed to. They want to do, and there is always a small set of top tasks that most customers expect to be able to do quickly and easily. If this is true on the Web, it is even more true for mobile.

At your company Customer Carewords, what does a typical consulting engagement look like?

There are usually two parts. The first is to identify the customer top tasks. This can take up to three months and involves developing a comprehensive list of customer tasks based on research of the current website, search analysis, various customer feedback and research, competitors, social media, etc. Once the task list is complete we get customers to vote. If there are 100 customer tasks then typically the top 5 tasks will get as much of the vote as the bottom 50.

The next step is to measure the performance of the tasks. We create examples of top tasks and using remote testing, get customers to attempt to complete these tasks. We have three core metrics:

1. Success rate: how many customers successfully completed the task.
2. Disaster rate: how many customers thought they had got the right answer, but it’s the wrong answer.
3. Completion time: how long it takes customers to complete tasks.

We say that top task management is about bringing your success rate above 90%, your disaster rate below 5%, and then focusing on helping the customer complete the task in the fastest possible time.

Which companies do you consult for?

Mainly large organizations such as Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Atlas Copco, T-Mobile, etc. There have been over 400 implementations of the top tasks approach.

In large organisations, which departments hire you to do consulting?

Typically, it would be from the central web team which we generally find with the Communications or Marketing departments.

How do you address web problems that cut across organisational silos, and can’t be solved within a single department?

I was with a company recently where someone told me that she wrote the description of “How to redeem a coupon,” but that another part of the organization managed the application that allowed you to redeem the coupon. She had never spoken to anyone from that department.

Silo-fication is a big challenge for large organizations today. It becomes very obvious on the Web that the organization is not collaborating internally. The Web is the place you hang out your dirty linen for everyone to see. One of the benefits of the top tasks approach is that it encourages collaboration. The focus is not on the content or the technology or the organizational unit, but rather on the task of the customer.

In your CS Forum talk you gave the example of NHS Direct, where nobody was responsible for “helping people check symptoms”—people were responsible for content, or technology, or design, but not for helping customers achieve tasks. How does the Top Task Management approach address this type of problem?

It measures outcomes instead of inputs. Focusing on the content is too narrow and often leads to navel-gazing and lots of content professionals telling each other how important content is. Focusing on what your content helps people do changes the whole dynamic. People want to check symptoms. Shouldn’t it be a core objective of a health website to help people check symptoms? It’s not enough to say you have content on symptoms. You have to manage and measure the outcome—whether people can actually check their symptoms.

You also said that most web teams use inappropriate metrics that don’t relate to the success of customers in using the website. If that’s true, how did organisations get into the position of using web metrics that aren’t related to business success? And how would you convince such an organisation that measuring customer task completion is best for the business? That doesn’t seem to have occurred to them yet!

It’s all part of the Cult of Volume. Years ago, when the Web was starting out, web teams were desperately trying to prove that their website was important. So they looked at their statistics and found the biggest number they could find, which was called HITS. Now, HITS stands for How Idiots Track Success.

Most web metrics aren’t much better than HITS. They tell you about what has happened but not why. So, I’m sure BP were delighted by the fact that they had lots of visitors to their website after the oil spill. If most of the customers coming to your website go to Support is that a good thing? If people are spending lots of time on your website maybe it’s because it’s confusing. If people spend lots of time reading content on a particular page does that mean the content is good or bad?

Would you pay sales people based on how much they talked? Yet, that’s how content people are measured—based on how much they write. It’s so often about crude volume measures. These measures are used because they give the impression that something is happening, that some value is being created. But in many situations volume is actually a measure of value destruction. If we do not know what our customers want to do and whether they have been able to do it, how can we really measure or manage anything?

Is it really possible to change the culture of an organisation from organisation-centric to customer-centric? If so, where have you seen this happen successfully, and how long did it take?

Nothing is immovable, nothing is forever. Look at IBM. It managed to change itself from being a hardware company to being a services company. The change is not easy but it’s not impossible. Today, most organizations are still structured for a pre-Web world. They want to tell customers things and they want to get customers to do what the organization wants them to do. They think they can use clever marketing, PR and advertising to do this. That’s not the way the world works today. It’s a customer’s world. Social media is about customer power, not organizational power. It is not a matter of choice for organizations to become more customer centric. Those that don’t will go into decline.

Have you found that running a Top Tasks exercise helps to change organisational culture? If so, how?

When we start a top tasks project many people within the organization will say that they don’t have tasks, that they have tools or information. Showing that every tool has a purpose, that customers always have a task in mind when they look for information, can really turn the light on. All this stuff within the organization should have a purpose—a customer task—and if it doesn’t, then why is it there? It’s the same for intranets. We ask: how does this help employees complete a task?

Actually, once people get used to the tasks concept they often get excited. It’s much more rewarding when you can see your content actually help someone achieve something. When we start focusing on the outcomes that leads to a much more fulfilling career. Because you can see how what you do as a professional impacts on the customer. So, that’s a real driver of change.

You’ve argued that the web is revolutionising marketing, sales, customer service, and support. Are the senior managers you speak to ready to accept these radical changes, or are they still in a state of denial?

Many are still in a state of denial, hoping, I suppose, that they retire before the impact of the revolution truly hits home. But there is progress for sure. Many in senior management saw the Web initially as an IT challenge but that has all changed. It moved over to Marketing or Communications for a while, but I see a growing recognition that the Web is primarily about service—self-service. So, there is a growing sense that a website is not just about pretty pictures and propaganda.

Another trend I see is how organizations are moving slowly away from a model of teams to a model of networks. Instead of setting up a team to deal with a project—with the team nearly always coming from the same department, we now see loose networks being formed that tend to be cross-departmental. This is a very hopeful sign.

You’re leading a masterclass in London called “Creating service-focused websites”. Who is it for, and what will attendees learn?

It is essentially for people involved in managing or running large, complex websites. Where there are a lot of demands on the web team from the tiny tasks (low customer demand but high political clout). The methods in the masterclass will give you the evidence to prioritize and focus. It will give you the capacity to say no to the tiny tasks and to develop a model of continuous improvement for your customers’ top tasks.

Can you share any success stories from previous masterclasses you’ve led?

We do a lot of work with Cisco. A top task of Cisco customers is to download software updates. Working with the Cisco team, the average time for a software download has been reduced from 280 seconds to 100 seconds. In 2011, Cisco was awarded No 1 spot for usability among large technology websites by Site IQ. Microsoft have used to top tasks approach for their Pinpoint site which is a marketplace where you find IT consultancies and third party software vendors. The approach helped them increase customer inquiries from 9% to 25%; so 25% of those visiting the site now end up contacting a Microsoft partner.

Gerry on video

Here’s Gerry’s keynote speech at the Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London.

Gerry McGovern — Keynote: Manage the tasks, not the content from Together London on Vimeo.

Don’t miss the masterclass

If you enjoyed this interview, don’t miss Gerry’s masterclass on 3 May in London–tickets are still available.

Gerry McGovern—Creating service-focused websites

The future of the web is about self-service: helping people serve themselves quickly and easily. Your web career—your future—is about understanding how to create quality service-focused websites. This masterclass will help you do that. Full description of Gerry’s masterclass.

Martin Belam—Responsive information architecture

How can we apply the principles of information architecture (IA) in a world of proliferating mobile devices, “responsive design”, and “mobile first” projects? Whether your product is content-based or transactional, Martin’s techniques will help you to design for the modern multi-platform web without throwing out the principles of user-centered design—including business goals, user research, stakeholder facilitation, and working with agile development teams. Full description of Martin’s masterclass.

Lisa Welchman—Web governance for your organisation

Who in your organisation gets to make the big decisions about your website? Multiple departments trying to control what goes on the site and conflicting ideas about the site’s purpose are a common recipe for heartache, frustration, wasted opportunities, and worst of all, a confusing digital presence. Full description of Lisa’s masterclass.

Randall Snare & Laurence Veale—Mobile content

You no longer have control over what your content looks like. Aggregators like Instapaper, Readablility, and Flipboard give users the power to read content when, where, and how they like. So we need to start focusing on the purpose and meaning of the content, rather than its layout in the page. To reach your audience in a meaningful way, you need to know how to plan for mobile content. Full description of Randall & Laurence’s masterclass.

Early bird rates available until tomorrow!

The best rates are available until Thursday 5 April, which is tomorrow–so don’t delay, register now! I hope you can make it.

The internet and the social web are revolutionising the events industry. It’s now possible to organise a conference for a relatively small group of people who are passionate about a topic, even if they’re scattered around the world. You don’t need a large advertising budget, the support of mainstream media, or an office full of staff – you just need a compelling story, a committed team, great speakers, a community that’s engaged with you via social media, some logistical savvy and a large dollop of courage.

Thanks to Martin Belam for encouraging me to write it.

Three ways to scope a project

Back in October 2010, Stacey King Gordon posted Content strategy and the project pricing dilemma to the content strategy Google group. She posed an insightful question which started a great discussion. Here’s an extract:

…[an agency I collaborate with] work hard to price the end-to-end design project based on assumptions — the client’s, theirs, and mine as the content strategist. However, as I dig in and do my work — content analysis, stakeholder interviews, brand research — the scope of the project inevitably grows. It’s very difficult to be accurate in what the final site will entail until the content strategy work has been done.

It’s worth reading the whole thread. I found this response from Karen McGrane particularly illuminating:

This is a common problem when you try to scope development—both copywriting and technology—without a clear understanding of what will be required. There are really only three options:

1. Only work with clients that will accept a 2-phased project (strategy/design + development)
2. Only deliver work within the bounds of the initial contract
3. Change order, change order, change order

We treat web design like accountancy

Karen’s three-way choice about how to scope projects provides a neat way to explain the changes I’ve noticed in the way UX-like services—web and interaction design, software development, content development, etc.—are bought and sold.

Option 1 implies a consultancy relationship: the client thinks that they need expert help to work out where they are, and where they need to go, before they can start implementation. This is strategy.

Options 2 and 3 are more like a vendor, solution provider, or contractor relationship: the client knows what they want, and they’re shopping around for someone who has the right experience and can agree on terms. This type of relationship is familiar and comfortable for organizations: it’s similar to the relationship they might have with standardized professional services firms like accountants, or software vendors, or even cleaning contractors. This is tactics.

Until recently, most organizations have managed to buy these types of services using options 2 and 3. Need a website redesign? Write a request for proposal (RFP) and send it to some agencies to get quotes. Agencies like selling in this way too. Why is that?

Fixed specs are attractive

Let’s start with the buyer. She works in an organizational silo: maybe it’s marketing, IT, product management, or corporate communications. Although she has organizational goals in mind when she decides to start a web initiative, she’s more focused on her silo’s goals. All of her budget comes from the silo, and her performance is measured based on that silo’s metrics, not on the higher-level goals of the business. From the client’s point of view, it’s much easier to buy a fixed-price, nailed-down contract.

Even if she has some doubts about what should be in the spec, it’s easier to get her manager to fund a clearly-articulated, conservative scope than an open-ended strategic exploration whose results are unknown, and which could easily open a can of worms. For example, it might suggest that the organization needs to change the way it operates in some way. My goodness, we might need to talk to the other departments! Our client wants a quiet life, and that’s scary stuff right there.

We could be forgiven for thinking, “those wretched clients! Why are they so short-sighted?” But that’s only half the story. Web professionals are scared of strategy, and we use the distraction sell to keep projects within our comfort zones. We’re comfortable using option 2, and option 3 is even better, because it allows us to blame those pesky clients for all the faulty assumptions in the original contract. There’s nothing the lizard brain likes better than setting ourselves up for failure.

But fixed specs are dangerous

So what’s wrong with fixed specs? Let’s start with economics. Do you ever see web designers complaining on twitter about crappy RFPs, and how difficult it is to compete on price with the 3000 other web design shops who claim to be able to do great work for peanuts? Have you ever come across a client who decided to outsource their work to a contractor thousands of miles away in a low-cost location? Or have you ever heard copywriters complaining that companies just don’t appreciate the true value of content?

If the spec really is nailed down, if the strategy work’s been done—that is, if the client truly knows what they need—the actual implementation work is less valuable, more price-sensitive, and will eventually become commoditized. Someone else will do it for less, and probably to a good-enough standard. (Jared Spool calls this distinction hands vs. brains.) That’s great if you’re creating a factory-style contracting business in a low cost economy, but if you live in London or San Francisco, eventually you’ll have problems funding your latte and iPad habit.

Many web projects are sold in a murky bait-and-switch fashion, where the agency agrees to an unrealistic fixed spec written by the client, and then hopes that once the problems become obvious, the client will prefer to pay their way out of the mess rather than starting over with a new agency. You’ll recognize this practice from the technology industry, who call it lock-in. (They used to say that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. That isn’t true any more.)

I see the move towards content strategy as part of a slow recognition that this type of sales and project management has mostly been disastrous. Objectives aren’t met, nobody plans for content governance, and projects focus on short-term pizazz instead of achieving business objectives in a sustainable way.

Client: “We want content strategy, but we need to know what it looks like first”

Let’s return to Stacey’s question. We’re competing for a client project, and we want to include a content strategy piece, because we know it’s the right thing to do for the success of the project—and it will also differentiate our proposal. But we’re worried that the client won’t buy a two-phase project, because they want to compare our proposal with all the others. And the RFP has a set budget and timeline.

The tempting option (which Stacey explains in the thread) is to add a line item for “content strategy”, make some assumptions about the outcome of that process, and then bake those assumptions into a single-phase proposal that includes implementation (and presumably a commitment to a fixed delivery date.)

Here’s the problem: if these assumptions are correct, the client isn’t ready for content strategy. They’re not ready to acknowledge a problem that’s bigger than a silo or a delivery channel, or to ask consultants to help them with strategy. It’s much easier to say, “we need technical help with development, design, and web writing” than to say “we need strategic advice, web therapy, and inter-department facilitation.” Crucially, the person buying probably isn’t ready to become an agent of change in their organization. Change hurts, and actively advocating for it scares the hell out of people.

No content strategy? That’s a show-stopper

When a client asks an agency to build a website, and admits to not having a content strategy, that’s a show-stopper. You can’t just graft strategy onto the project and cross your fingers.

Just because a client says they want content strategy, it doesn’t mean that they understand what that actually entails, or that they’re ready to start changing the organization. The best we can do is to explain the problem as clearly as we can, talk about the pain and suffering that will continue to occur if it isn’t addressed, and politely decline work when clients don’t appreciate the value of a strategic approach. They’ll be back, in time.

Good news for content strategy advocates

This is great news for those of us who are tying to raise our game, to leave our comfort zones, and to get our practice to a place where it sustainably serves both business objectives and user needs. (Note: if you’re already there, congrats! Many of us aren’t.)

The sales methods and working practices of many existing agencies (and internal teams too) are threatened by the growing realization among clients that their web initiatives aren’t effective. And the two-stage scoping model is key to understanding this shift. Can traditional agencies hack it?

The skills that a web professional needs are changing: it’s less about design chops, technical prowess, web writing skills–all essential of course, but also widely and cheaply available. The skills that set true web professionals apart are interpersonal skills like facilitation, counseling, advocacy, diplomacy, pragmatism, and patience. And the courage to be an agent of change.

In practice it will take a long time for client-side advocates to lead their organizations into the change management programs they actually need to start to get a hold of their content and web problems. But it’s starting to happen. And those of us who work as consultants should take an active role in the process, by refusing to participate in unethical selling practices.

But our organizations are still set up like none of that has happened. Pre-web processes, job descriptions, culture, attitudes—corporate denial. It’s 1994 all over again.

The impending crisis

Here’s the problem. The disconnection between the way organizations operate and the web’s revolutionary changes is getting so big that it’s causing a crisis. Most organizations still don’t have the basics of web strategy, governance, execution, and measurement covered. Ten years ago that was a competitive disadvantage. Today it’s a set of chronic risks: strategic, financial, regulatory, and legal.

Which is where you come in.

Web governance is nobody’s job, so make it yours

Today, web professionals face a stark choice.

We can keep our heads down while watching this slow-motion train crash from the comfort of our official job descriptions, perhaps taking some perverse pleasure in the fact that we told people this would happen, and they ignored us. This is the way to make ourselves replaceable, outsource-able, fireable—not to mention depressed. The best possible outcome is that someone else decides to take the lead, but a long, painful decline is more likely. This route doesn’t require any courage, but it’s reckless all the same. As Christine Pierpoint puts it, “be careful of what you wish for”.

The alternative is to acknowledge that establishing web governance is nobody’s job, and instead of whining about it, make it our own. That means stepping outside of our comfort zones and job descriptions, speaking up against the status quo, and leading. Scary stuff.

What Seth Godin taught me about web governance

If that makes you think it might be time to leave the web profession and transition to something safer, stay with me for a moment. This problem isn’t exclusive to our profession.

In his masterpiece Linchpin, Seth Godin describes the effect of the end of the industrial era on our organizations:

We have gone from two teams (management and labour) to a third team, the linchpins.

Godin’s linchpin is an indispensable person: an artist, someone who exerts emotional labour to overcome the resistance, who challenges the status quo, who pursues human connection, who makes change by leading and shipping.

We’re living through a period of massive cultural change, and the rise of the web is at the center of it. Organizations need linchpins in order to survive, because they need to change how they operate to fit the realities of the changing world. And when it comes to the web, most organizations have been trying to ignore change for so long that they’re suffering from a serious case of denial.

So if you’re convinced by Godin–and you should be, he makes a strong case–it’s not just web people who face a stark choice. Every professional in the Western world is in a similar situation: if you don’t lead your organization by becoming an agent of change, you’ll become a replaceable cog.

How to talk so management will listen

So what does being a linchpin have to do with web governance, and how can we apply it in practice? Stop whining and start leading.

We’ve all done it: whining about how difficult it is to do our jobs, how nobody appreciates us, how colleagues don’t understand what we do, how our jobs are made impossible by organizational culture. It’s almost standard practice for web professionals. The problem is, whining is the perfect way to get management to write off our concerns as the obsessive-compulsive ranting of geeks with poor interpersonal skills and no understanding of business objectives. We can do better.

When we whine and complain, we’re effectively asking others to give us permission to make the changes we need to do our jobs properly. That permission will never come.

The only way out is to stop waiting for permission, and to start leading. This isn’t technically complex, but it takes courage: the willingness to leave our comfort zones, face our own fear of confronting the status quo, and overcome our resistance to shipping. It also takes a lot of messy interpersonal work: advocacy, facilitation, diplomacy, pragmatism, and patience. This is what Godin calls “emotional labour”. Like it or not, these are the key skills of the modern web professional.

If we want to talk so management will listen, we need to sell to their pain. What risks is the organization taking by ignoring web governance problems? What opportunities is it missing? How could overcoming the challenges we’re facing as web professionals improve the organization’s future prospects, or its competitiveness?

Get out of your comfort zone: ship web governance

This is a time of huge opportunity for web professionals. But if you want to embrace it, you need to leave your comfort zone and start shipping. Become a linchpin, an agent of change, and a web governance advocate. Your organization needs you.

Note: For a longer take on web governance, check out my recent article in A List Apart.