Death of the web team?
Where does responsibility for digital communications sit within a large organisation?
That used to be a fairly easy question (“In the web team of course!”) but it’s not so simple any more.
These days, it begs two rather more difficult questions: which bit of digital and what kind of responsibility do you mean?
Digital communications has evolved something like this:
- IT. In the beginning there was code, and only the tech guys knew how to transform it into websites. Responsibility for managing the channel was theirs accordingly, but this wasn’t terribly responsive to the needs of the organisation, was poorly integrated, and not at all focused on end users.
- Comms + IT. Databases (and later, CMSs) liberated content from code. Responsibility for the ‘new media’ transferred to the business, web teams sprung up in communications departments, while the underlying infrastructure remained with IT or got outsourced. Websites were still organisation-focused but awareness grew fast about accessibility, information architecture, and writing for the web.
- Devolved publishers + Comms + IT. With publishing volumes increasing faster than resources, web monkeying was incrementally farmed out across the organisation, often without much of a plan for quality, editorial oversight and skills transfer. Much vanity publishing ensued and keeping all those pages current inevitably became like painting the Forth Bridge.
- Users + Devolved publishers + Comms + IT. Then came a growing recognition of the importance of providing a good online customer experience, with fewer, better pages and more usable transactions. Websites became more user-led, evidence-based, and search-friendly. Quality assurance and training of devolved publishing was tightened up, with more of the responsibility returning to the centre.
- Moderators + Users + Devolved publishers + Comms + IT. Along came forums, blogs, commenting on articles and the brave new world of ‘user generated content’. New responsibilities brought in new people (with no need for pesky CMS training) to moderate, facilitate and respond to users’ feedback. User-focused web management was by now a mainstream principle, but the organisation was still in control of its message.
- Everyone else + Moderators + Users + Devolved publishers + Comms + IT. Here comes everyone! And a zillion free tools to play with. The explosion in social interaction online created direct communications between customers and employees, and before long it will be happening all over the place. The organisation is no longer in control of where customer-employee or customer-customer interaction happens; let alone what’s being said. Digital communications is now, or will soon be, everyone’s job – listening, collaborating and responding online must become core competences for all if the organisation wants to continue to manage its reputation and meet the expectations of its customers.
So if everyone is going to be at it in future, where will responsibility for digital communications sit? Will there be any need for ‘web teams’ at all? Could responsibility for digital become atomised like it has for Human Resources or Corporate Social Responsibility?
In both those professions, highly specialist, strategically important responsibilities once held in large central teams are now almost completely dispersed – with only a handful of experts setting the rules and giving guidance from the centre.
You could anticipate the same fate for digital. Just as HR can’t line manage for everyone, and just as CSR teams can’t be socially aware on everyone’s behalf, neither can web teams engage with all of the organisation’s many niche customer groups on many niche subjects with anything like the immediacy or authenticity that local teams and individual decision-makers can.
On the other hand, you might argue that this trend of decentralisation could lead to a stronger role for central digital teams in future – just a slightly different one.
That’s certainly my view. Not only because I have a mortgage to pay, but because ‘doing digital well’ is now of such strategic importance and involves such a complex and sophisticated mix of skills, disciplines and knowledge that it needs stronger than ever leadership from a centre of genuine expertise.
I’d even venture to say that in the past we may have devolved some of the wrong things. It’s time for web teams to rein in control over quality of content and user experience, and let go of the local conversations – providing guidance, clear policies, support where it’s needed and light-touch monitoring where it’s not.
Rumours of the web team’s death (in the title of this blog post at least) have been greatly exaggerated. To me, the future of the web team involves a simultaneous strengthening of control by the centre and a transfer of trust and skills to the wider organisation. It’s about choosing the right bits of digital, and the right bits of responsibility to hold onto or to devolve.
The web team is dead. Long live the web team.
British Hallmarking joins BIS web platform
I just can’t resist blogging these before and after shots.
The British Hallmarking Council website relaunched yesterday on the Department for Business platform which – as I am intent on banging on about – was designed by my team as a shared service for BIS and all its partner bodies.
Here’s what their website looked like until yesterday:
And here’s how it looks now:
It’s not all about look and feel, clearly – I’m happy to say BHC has worked hard on improving the content too. But as far as it matters, this design really works; and curiously it works slightly better than the main BIS site whose templates it shares.
There are a few snagging issues to iron out, including some new ones I’ve spotted tonight while writing this post, but all in all it’s a dramatic improvement and I’m chalking this up as another success for the team.
(BHC, in case you’re wondering, are the folks who look after the classification of precious metals and not, as someone joked to me today, anything to do with greetings cards).
Digging digital government: recent major works and what they mean
Major works by Whitehall webbies in the past six weeks have repeatedly got top billing on No 10′s legendary grid, and even made front page news.
This feels very different from even a year ago, when web teams had to work hard just to get their voices heard on the importance of the web for customer service, its power to humanise and its potential for government-citizen participation.
But now, and for the first time, it’s starting to feel like we can retire some of those old soapboxes and get out our toolboxes instead.
Here is a rundown of the biggest developments either by or affecting central government digital folk in the last month and a half:
- Your Freedom
Launched today, this national debate about legislation, civil rights and the role of the state is by far the biggest online crowdsourcing exercise yet attempted in the UK. As such it’s also the first real test of the readiness of all parties – the public, public sector and politicians – for digital democracy on a large scale. It’ll take serious commitment from all three to be a success and, while it’s way too early to draw any conclusions about the algorithms of democracy, as I write the amount of constructive engagement by users considerably outweighs the inevitable speak your branes-esque commentary (despite sabotage attempts); and the commitment to listen from Whitehall and Ministers is clearly set out. There’s even a Twitter feed about how the technology is holding up in the face of higher than expected demand. As a precedent, a catalyst for change and a demonstration of the cultural shift from traditional PR to digital engagement, who could ask for a higher profile case study?
- Release of website performance data
Last Friday, for the first time ever, all central government Departments reported the costs, usage figures and in some cases quality metrics for their websites. It’s not complete and it’s not totally consistent, as others have noted, but it’s a huge start to a process that recognises the important role of government websites, will be repeated annually and expanded to more government bodies. David Pullinger, Head of Digital Policy at COI, has the inside story and incisive analysis.
- Spending Challenge
Effectively a ‘Your Freedom’ for the public sector, what’s interesting about this is that it’s taking place in the open, using free open source software (there, Simon, I said it!) to collect ideas in private while publicly showcasing a flavour of the ideas being sent in. And because it’s been promoted to every employee of every part of the public sector, it sends a clear message about the power and importance of two way digital techniques for mass participation in decision-making.
- Transparency commitments and the freeze on marketing and advertising spend
Together these two developments present a huge challenge but also unprecedented opportunities to Whitehall’s digital communications professionals, leaving no room for doubt that digital channels and skills are going to be right at the heart of delivery of publications and campaigns from now on.
- Commentable coalition programme
Now closed for comments, this site is still worth reflecting on for the fact that the first major publication of this parliament was a commentable website, not a PDF. (Alright, not just a PDF). Also noteworthy for the very fact that the comments are closed. It was time-limited, running for just a few weeks, during which it received nearly 10,000 comments – more comments in a shorter period than any previous outing for the Commentariat-inspired format, and as such it remains probably the biggest case study to date for that platform.
A few observations arising from all this:
- An obvious point but let’s spell it out: online participation in government policy has now moved from the fringes to the mainstream – it’s become the norm, no longer the domain of a handful of early adopters.
- Open-ended engagement looks set to give way to shorter, time-limited consultations – the coalition programme and spending challenge sites were both burners, built to be used and thrown away.
- After many successful precedents, online consultation is becoming more trusting and open – the Your Freedom site uses post-moderation and trusts its user community to flag up abuse, quite a departure from everything that’s gone before.
- Whitehall’s web teams are becoming more collaborative – every last one of the developments listed above have involved Departments pooling their digital resource, for example to share ideas, compare notes and muck in on specifications, wireframes, testing and moderation. Good for gov webbies, good for the public purse.
- The much-discussed culture change needed for ‘government 2.0′ is happening now - very high profile commitment from Ministers + hierarchical nature of the civil service = crowdsourced opinion taken seriously by Department officials. Only the thickest-skinned of Sir Humphreys can ignore this latest groundswell, surely?
A better website guaranteed?
The Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) relaunched its website yesterday …and fans of this blog might instantly notice it bears one or two similarities to the Department for Business site my team launched back in March.
That’s because ECGD are the first customer for the BIS shared web service, using the ready-made templates and CMS platform we developed for use by any of our partner bodies and a handful of central government departments with whom BIS shares a minister (ECGD being one of the latter).
I wasn’t directly involved in the migration and launch, so can’t say too much about that, but am pleased to welcome them on board and proud of my part in enabling the dramatic improvement shown in these before and after shots below – all at a far lower cost than could ever have been the case if they’d gone it alone.
Lots more sites will follow ECGD onto the platform in the months ahead, with flexible options to re-use the same set of ready-made ‘BIS partner’ templates or to develop their own, saving lots of lovely public lolly in the process.
ECGD site before:
And after:
So what did Steph Gray ever do for us?
Today the man they call @lesteph is leaving the Civil Service to work on… well, other le stuff. Read about it in his own words here.
I’ve spent the best part of a year working alongside him since the creation of BIS brought our two teams together in June 2009. If you’re reading this blog you’ll most likely know Steph already so I won’t bang on about his personal qualities – it’s just not British. Instead I’d like to say a few things about what he’s done.
- Redefined how to consult online. Government webbies used to experiment with ways of collecting feedback using established tools like discussion forums, webchats and wikis. Enter Steph with the ‘commentable document‘ approach, Commentpress and Commentariat which have since become standard issue for any online consultation worth its salt.
- Gave us cool free tools to do it ourselves. By open sourcing what he built, even lending hosting and tech support here and there, Steph made the previously impossible easy, saved public money and influenced digital bods across Whitehall to come up with similar solutions – and to open source their stuff too.
- Opened doors …and held them open. It became easier to persuade risk and security people that the sky wouldn’t fall in when there were examples we could point to. UK government’s adoption of digital engagement was sped up in no small measure by the tools, precedents, advocacy and even cheeky lobbying that Steph brought to the party.
- Set strategy and defined digital engagement. He gave us his take on what digital engagement is all about and how it fits into the traditional work of a government department, refining it into this listen > explain > engage > convene model, which I for one swiftly nicked.
- Pushed the boundaries of government PR. I’m pretty sure he introduced the social media news release into the corridors of power (or at least press office), not to mention doing interesting new things with dashboards and email alerts.
- Shared, shared and shared some more. He blogged, he coded, he lunched, he hosted, he spoke at events for the civil service and beyond, and he got the rest of us sharing too, setting up cross-government groups for both the digital engagement and intranet folk.
- And last but not least, he defined the scale and complexity of the operation with this slightly mind-boggling Venn diagram. You could base a consultancy on this alone. And maybe he will.
Radio silence
A reminder that in line with propriety guidance for civil servants during a general election I’ll be fairly quiet here and on Twitter until a government is formed after 6 May.
If I do post stuff, it will be about things other than work. Normal (sporadic) service will resume afterwards.
Welcome to my world
My wife tends to keep a pretty low profile online, and has always shown remarkable resistance to my social media evangelism.
But as of last night she’s broken cover and written her first ever blog post for the BBC, where she has a regular writing gig for daytime drama Doctors. It’s a great post, too.
So we’re now a two blog household, one if them considerably better written than the other. I’ll get to work on Dylan to make the hat trick. (Not that I can take any of the credit for getting Joy to blog, mind you!)
Under construction: behind the scenes of a government website (soft) launch
Website launches aren’t what they used to be. Back in the day, the birth or re-birth of a website would be heralded with a big ‘welcome’ story on the homepage, a press release, a section gushing about its new and improved features (probably none of which anyone had said they wanted) and – if you were really lucky – a scrolling marquee with an animated gif or two.
These days, it’s all a bit more sophisticated. The unified BIS site went live quietly this weekend, without much fanfare either before or after. Our comms plan said:
This plan proposes a soft launch externally, in view of the current political and economic landscape and in line with web users’ attitudes to change. (…) In developing the site, we have deliberately minimised the impact on end users. The site design is an evolution of the current site and all URLs will be redirected. Users have told us in research that they do not want things to ‘keep changing’.
Instead of drawing attention to the features, we hope the site’s visitors will just find it familiar, intuitive and somehow more satisfying to use than the three sites it’s replaced. We don’t want them to notice it’s all that different, particularly, just to feel that it’s better. And if it’s not, to tell us what we’ve got wrong so we can improve.
So we’ve switched it on quietly, added a short reassuring message about what’s happened, asked for feedback via an unobtrusive Get Satisfaction widget, and encouraged our email subscribers and Twitter followers to give us their thoughts.
But while we may not be trumpeting what’s good about it via the official channels, there’s no reason I can’t on this blog. Here are just some of the things I’m most proud of:
- The platform. It’s not quite my fantasy CMS but it’s the best I’ve yet seen of its class. We ran a tough competition, won by a worthy supplier, with a developer team who’ve helped us build an enviable amount of flexibility, usability and control into the CMS (in pretty short order; with the mother of all MoG changes in the middle of it, in good time and on budget).
- The savings. Just by switching this site on and turning the old ones off we’ll save more than £2.5m over the next four years. ‘Nuff said.
- The shared service. We’ve built a system for the enterprise. From the terms of the contract to the adaptability of the templates, this is a platform designed for convergence – and one which I’m confident our partner bodies will actively want to join and help us develop, saving money and effort in the coming years.
- The transparency. For those interested in such things we’ve quietly published the costs of the project, the slides from our user research and given access to our web stats using a clever thing Steph‘s cooked up from the Google Analytics API. And, by dint of the level of accountability intrinsic to Get Satisfaction’s company-customer pact, we’re committing ourselves to dealing openly and frankly with feedback, questions or complaints in the first few weeks of live use.
- Nine-way redirection. Merging three websites into one meant preserving URLs from three domains, with three places to send them: to the new site (for content we’ve kept), to the archives (for content we’ve weeded) and to other sites (for content we’ve relocated). Plus a long list of friendly, short URLs from all three sites. It’s not been easy, but we think we got most of them.
- Manual migration. With 3 months to move around 5,000 pages you’d have forgiven us for automation. But the team and I were dead set on that being a disastrous strategy and we’ve done it the hard way instead – cutting the total number of pages nearly in half and updating what’s left in the process.
- Metadata-driven IA. I’ve written about this before. By ditching hierarchy in favour of serving up content by various metadata fields we’ve flattened the site, reduced the numbers of clicks, brought the stuff people care about closer to the surface, done away with pointless intro pages and – we think – more closely reflected the niche interests of our audience groups. And made the site architecture MoG resistant (if not entirely MoG-proof) in the process.
There are some creases to iron out, both in the content and code, but fewer than you might expect with a project of this size. I hope you’ll agree it’s a move in the right direction and one the BIS team should be proud of.
Well done and thanks in particular to John Turnbull, Will Callaghan, Kevin Herrmann, Ian Azille and the network of web publishers at BIS; and Julie, Jane, Adam and Robin from Eduserv for all working ridiculously hard on this project, bringing so much creativity and doing such a fantastic job.
[Edit, before they notice: I forgot to thank the guys at Redweb for their input on the wireframes and creative design. They pulled out all the stops to turn it around exceptionally quickly back in the late summer last year. ]
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Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
