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’.