Looking Outside the CMS Box for Enteprise Website Governance

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Gilbane Beacon Guidance on Content Strategies, Practices and Technologies

Looking Outside the CMS Box for Enterprise Website Governance

By Ian Truscott, Senior Analyst

August 2010 Updated September 2012

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ebsite content delivers a lasting “first impression” to prospects, customers, citizens or visitors. Quality lapses such as a misspelling, an errant brand color, an outdated W page or a brand inconsistency all reflect badly on attention to detail. They can erode the vital trust in the professionalism of your services, the reliability of your products, and attention you will pay to meeting consumer needs. When those lapses are related to compliance issues (such as regulatory requirements and accessibility standards), they can be even more damaging, often resulting in financial penalties and negative impact on reputation.

Content management systems (CMS) and practices have played a significant role in helping enterprises manage web content in the face of these challenges. Quality content, consistent branding, regulatory compliance, and process efficiencies are business benefits long derived from CMS implementations. The technology has been so effective, in fact, that global enterprises often utilize a range of CMS platforms within their operations. The discipline of enterprise content management (ECM) is becoming less about imposing and implementing a single repository, and more about developing strategies to deal with the realities of heterogeneous CMS environments.

One of the primary points of challenge in such environments is effective website governance – securing quality and compliance through the consistent implementation and application of corporate policies and standards. More and more companies are finding that today’s fast-paced and rapidly-evolving content requirements are pushing the limits of their CMS when it comes to efficient, effective website governance. Despite the best content management technologies and the most disciplined enterprise content management implementation, organizations still struggle with quality and compliance issues. Customers and prospects can still find outdated content, inconsistencies and errors when they scratch the surface of web properties. These symptoms of broken governance are signs that perhaps the CMS alone is not enough for enterprise-wide control and administration of content standards and policies.

This paper is designed to help web and content management professionals sort through the issues of where and how content quality and compliance are best managed within their organization. It aims to answer the following questions: . What are the critical content governance risks and issues facing the organization? Some of them might surprise you. . Is your CMS implementation meeting these challenges? And if not, what are the additional processes and functions that you need to consider? . What solutions are available to address governance needs that are not addressed by CMS? How are they being used and to what benefit?

Understanding Contemporary Governance Issues

The production, management and delivery of information and content, whether for internal or external audiences, have become major business functions at many companies. Although managing content is not their core business, its scale means that it can become one of the biggest operational issues and areas of risk. Within such environments, ensuring compliance and quality that is worthy of brand is a high-pressure challenge today.

Maintaining standards used to be relatively easy. Gatekeepers in marketing, communications, public relations, or legal reviewed and approved all outbound messages. Target audiences received consistent, on-message, on-brand, grammatically correct, relevant communication. But most global companies no longer operate in such controlled fashion. Websites must evolve quickly to meet audience expectations for more personalized and relevant content in multiple languages. They also have to be adaptable to ever-changing technical and legal standards. Content-driven trends are evolving rapidly, too. What is the next blogging platform, the next device, the next Twitter, the next syndication format? It is difficult to embrace the next big platform or meet the latest regulatory requirement if a two-year enterprise software implementation is required. Business and technology agility have become essential. The nature of global business means that regions often need to move quickly to capitalize on opportunity, bypassing centralized controls.

It is easy to see how quality and compliance can be compromised with such potential for content chaos. Global, multi-brand organizations are especially at risk, as quality challenges increase exponentially with web content translations across product and regional web properties. Website governance becomes essential business practice if organizations are to retain control over their web properties. Such practice can have far-reaching impact in expected and unexpected ways. Key Value Propositions for Website Governance

Protecting and reinforcing brand. Corporate websites are brand beacons. One of their primary objectives is to serve as the corporate front door for prospects, investors, community members, or citizens. As such, an organization’s web presence is worthy of the same rigors of quality that are applied to other public interfaces.

Accessibility. It is a common misconception that “Why should you take the time to website governance starts and ends with legal make your site more accessible? In compliance to accessibility standards. This year’s addition to the service you’ll be doing twentieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities for the visually-impaired community, Act is putting accessibility in the spotlight, particularly accessible sites are more easily by strengthening of the laws that cover access to crawled, which is a first step in your Internet services and with a specific focus on devices site’s ability to appear in search results.” – T.V. Raman, Google such as smart phones. But thinking only about Research Scientist, on the Google accessibility is a narrow view of tackling the governance Central Webmaster Blog challenge, and one that ignores other important value propositions for governance.

Search engine optimization (SEO). Techniques and best practices for accessibility can also be applied to the practice of optimizing content for findability, which has a direct and measurable impact on the success of web engagement initiatives. The areas that need focus when making a page accessible – including its structure, its application of HTML markup, its adherence to web standards, and the use of keywords — are also best practices for SEO, as a search engine spider views a website through a similarly limited “text only” view. Good governance can control the content enrichment process, providing a framework for authors to ensure that content is on

message and well tagged with metadata. Compliance reporting tools can provide visibility on what search engines and audiences see and find.

Audience engagement and web experience management. Perhaps one of the most surprising impacts of website governance is its tie to top-line business benefits. Contemporary governance practices are not solely focused on internal, operational, or legal applications. We conduct business in an age in which every customer interaction matters and every page view is an opportunity for engagement. Governance practices and technologies that ensure consistent and compelling customer experiences are being funded and implemented at leading companies today, especially within global enterprises whose brand has value throughout the world.

Content Management Systems as Governance Tools?

We suggest that organizations consider four key issues when evaluating the demands for effective website governance and the capabilities within their CMS.

Top-tier Governance Visibility

A decade or so ago, conventional wisdom held that organizations could rein in their content challenges with enterprise content management systems. But ECM has not proved to be that predicted panacea. The 2010 annual survey conducted by the Content Management Professionals association indicates that over 50% of the 427 respondents’ companies have more than one system to perform the same function. In Gilbane’s experience, this happens because organizations tend to view content management initiatives in silos, sometimes around function (a single web content management tool, a single blogging tool, an intranet solution and a document management system) and sometimes around a business unit, product or marketing campaign.

We have also observed that enterprise systems, by their very nature, have struggled to keep pace with the more dynamic demands of the market and the external audience, particularly the evolving requirements for technical and legal compliance and the need for immediacy created by social media. Big company implementations are tested by requests that should be easy to accommodate – a blog for the CEO, the staging of a product launch, the creation of a corporate Twitter account, the rolling out of new brand or compliance standards across an existing web presence.

In an effort to be agile and to respond quickly to these demands, managers are often faced with difficult choices: an investment of time and money in a major change control event with the existing systems and processes, or just go tactical, launching the project quickly by reaching for a plethora of often-free, often cloud-based, best-of-breed tools. This is an increasingly common issue in larger businesses, with local operating units and multiple product marketing teams.

Multi-platform environments can serve critical and specialized business needs. They also multiply the governance challenge. Organizations often struggle to achieve top-tier visibility of quality and compliance issues across their diversity of platforms and applications.

Governance Process Integration

Gilbane often sees governance and compliance processes that are tied to the implementation of individual web initiatives. Rules, policies, and standards are baked into the CMS tools, but are not shared or visible outside of the initiative’s box. Implementing a CMS with built- in accessibility and quality checks as part of the approval process is a good start; but these capabilities are effectively locked down in a silo at the content item level. Lack of integrated governance processes between applications creates operational inefficiencies, limits top-level visibility, and reduces the organization’s ability to ensure best-practice governance across their online initiatives.

Content Reporting

Effective website governance demands that an organization be able to identify non-compliant pages, spelling errors, dead links, references to the now-retired CEO, and improper keywords.

Even if we could assume that the CMS system holds all of the content that visitors and search engines are finding, the majority of CMS systems are lacking when it comes to content reporting. Users cannot assume that a CMS manages multi-site content in a way that enables cross-domain views of the content being managed. Even the best CMS implementations are only aware of the content in the editorial context, perhaps managing and checking single components of content, but not the page served up to visitors. This would include templates, third-party syndicated content, images, and dynamic page elements. In this way, a CMS can be blind to a good portion of content that is delivered on websites, putting organizations at risk of serious breaches in compliance.

Agile Content Publishing

The practical reality is that within time-stressed organizations, agile content publishing processes inevitably win out over more rigid CMS-imposed processes. Goals of the original implementation are sacrificed and worked around in the interest of user adoption, as controls can add a level of complexity to the business user experience and impede expediency. In most cases, there is no safety net to catch the inevitable mistakes that occur.

It is clear that the current state of CMS implementations can create a complex, multi-faceted business challenge that is now often outside the governance scope and capabilities of a single CMS implementation, be it departmental or enterprise. How do organizations address website governance when the capabilities of one or a dozen CMS solutions are not sufficient to secure a compliant, high-quality web presence?

Website Governance Outside the CMS Box

Contemporary governance is a balancing act. On the one hand, governance as a discipline requires a holistic understanding of the content being presented to audiences and how it succeeds (or fails) to meet standards, policies and regulations. On the other hand, there is the practical

matter of operating in environments with silos of practice, multiple systems, and limited reporting capabilities.

Web and IT managers at large global companies have learned the hard way that getting the balance right means extending their CMS implementations. Website governance requires a view across silos and systems. With a CMS alone, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to create global, enterprise or C-level views of how an organization’s websites fair against their brand standards, policies, legal and ethical responsibilities.

In response to the needs of these organizations, Gilbane is seeing the emergence of a new class of enterprise-level solutions for sophisticated, seamless website governance that picks up where CMS systems leave off. They are specifically designed to address governance as an enterprise rather than departmental practice, automating key processes and delivering unified and consistent application of content quality and compliance standards.

Enterprise website governance platforms are gaining traction at large global enterprises, from packaged goods “Our web presence was made up of a manufacturers to international not-for-profits and patchwork of websites with no global NGOs (nongovernmental organizations). The consistency. URLs were registered ActiveStandards Web Quality Management platform is a and websites launched without leading example of the class of automated solutions that central oversight, and all our product divisions and country sites had is helping these organizations address the limitations of different colors and logos. . . .This siloed governance. has now been simplified, with a Enterprise website governance has delivered the greater focus on sense and simplicity, following benefits to current adopters: to present a customer-focused organization.” – Chris Villinger, Global . Reduced risk, through automated error detection Director Online, Countries and Planning, and top-tier visibility of quality and compliance B2B Online Team, Global Marketing & vulnerabilities across all web properties. Communications, Royal Philips . Increased customer conversions, through improved International user experience and increased brand impact. . Increased visitor traffic through systematic implementation of SEO best practice. . Streamlined operational efficiency through integration of global web governance processes within a single framework. . Enhanced productivity and reduced costs through the automation of time- consuming quality assurance processes. . Increased effectiveness of regional marketing, due to increased visibility and control over the web content localization process. . Enabled faster time to market of fully-compliant new websites, because they can simply plug into an established governance platform.

Agility and System Independence

A key benefit of enterprise website governance platforms is their ability to keep governance processes independent of the underlying content management tools.

Governance is about the coordination of website policies, people and processes. At a high level, it comprises four stages:

. Define and communicate: Establish the standards, policies, priorities, stakeholders (senior authors, site owners and senior sponsors) and success criteria for the organization and communicate them. . Educate: Articulate the business value of the standards to the people responsible for implementing them, and reinforce their business value. . Execute: Apply the standards and policies on the website as part of the day-to-day content publication process. . Measure and Monitor: Continually measure and monitor the corporate web properties against the defined standards and policies.

It is time-consuming and organizationally cumbersome to re-invent governance processes every time a new business opportunity presents itself. The guiding principle for effective governance is agility. With an enterprise governance platform that is CMS-agnostic, companies are able to slot a new website, tool or business unit into the governance process and adapt quickly to changes in legal compliance and technical or business requirements.

Conclusion: Stakeholder Discussion

In a relatively short period of time, websites have become mission-critical tools for global organizations. To keep pace with business and consumer requirements, CMS technology has evolved remarkably fast. Their capabilities have expanded from single-site management in the mid-1990s to large-scale, multisite, multilingual management today. They have revolutionized the online publishing process, enabling companies to deliver content faster and with great economy. But not without challenges. The websites of global companies can still be plagued by serious compliance problems that undermine the user experience, damage brand, and put companies at risk.

In this paper, we set out to frame the key discussion points about the right approach to website governance for your organization.

. What are the critical content governance risks and issues facing the organization?

Although every organization’s governance risks are unique, content quality and compliance always make the list, impacting brand value and adherence to regulatory requirements in certain markets. Revenue growth, time to launch websites and campaigns, customer satisfaction and self-service, and accessibility are among other common factors. . Is your CMS implementation meeting these challenges? And if not, what are the additional processes and functions that you need to consider?

Faced with an explosion of content volume and types, globally dispersed organizations have tried to address governance issues through CMS applications. By and large, these approaches provide functionality and process in silos, with an “inside out” view of content. In addition, they are often lacking in content reporting functionality that provides insight for decision-making. Tactical solutions pop up more and more frequently, often under the IT radar to meet digital marketing and social media demands. These factors can create compliance blind spots that put companies at risk because it is difficult to achieve top-tier visibility across global operations. For these and other reasons, your organization needs to consider where and how effective website governance is best managed. . What solutions are available to meet governance needs that are not addressed by CMS?

A class of enterprise website governance solutions has emerged to address the shortcomings of CMS-based governance. They can provide the top-tier visibility and control that business managers need to govern online operations, while making the everyday application of quality and compliance standards seamless to content professionals, including website editors and managers.

Website governance must exist in an environment that is adaptable to change, enabling organizations to be agile and responsive. A framework of governance that is independent of individual systems and projects, new working practices, technology, audience engagement initiatives, and changes to the brand is critical to operating as an agile organization.