The levers of power

 – posted April 14th, 2008 by Shane Diffily     No comments

It is 3 weeks since An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern announced his intention to resign in May. Already his successor has been anointed and is readying himself to take over as head of the cabinet.

Governance, it seems, abhors a vacuum.

Except on the web.

Poor web management

It is an unfortunate fact that many websites are poorly supervised.

Part of the problem seems to be fear of the unknown - of being sucked into debates with designers, coders and techies on subjects you know little about. Why not just leave them to it?

Why? Because the internet has changed beyond recognition in the past 10 years. There are no longer any excuses for the muddle, disorder and waste that can result from lack of governance. It is time for a well-founded and practical standard for website management to emerge.

The 5 levers of governance

Experience indicates that by tweaking just 5 levers you can start to build an effective governance system for your site. These are:

  • Skills: The expertise you need to manage and maintain the site.
  • Staff: The number of people you need.
  • Team: How to structure roles and people.
  • Process: The systems for supervising activity.
  • Tools: The technology needed for the job.

Of course, your freedom to play with these levers depends greatly on the scale of your site.

That is a large scale site needs (and can probably afford) lots of specialist skills, large numbers of staff, robust processes and expensive tools.

A small site on the other hand, may operate perfectly well with a team of one, i.e. someone with broad skills who can get the most from simple tools.

Governance on your site

Finding the mix that is appropriate for your site can take some effort. Even then you’ll never get everything you want. Budgets are too tight for that.

Yet, just by going through the decision process you can learn a lot. Plus, it creates the conceptual foundation upon which future operations can be built.

I’ll be explaining how to create successful systems of Web Governance at iQ Boot Camp, Thursday April 24th 2008.

Categories Design

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