Rev Up Your Web Strategy: New Study from J Boye
April 21, 2009
Beyond Search read with interest “Best Practices for Creating a Web Strategy: What Web Managers Need to Know”
by Dorthe R. Jespersen & Peter E.B. Nissen J. Boye March 2009. You will want to snag a copy even if you are content with your present Web site. (More information is available here.)
The first line of the Executive Summary is “Too many web teams suffer from lack of direction or constant organizational battles.” This reviewer, once a one-man information center and web manager, experienced the problem of direction first hand in failing to get a web strategy for a non-profit off the ground as his CEO told him straight off that the budget was no problem and that he would take full responsibility. He grabbed the ground and the direction and eventually terminated this reviewer’s position.
Using interviews with nineteen mostly Danish public and global organizations and a couple private companies and drawing upon several conferences and a 250 member community of practice in Europe facilitated by J. Boye, this monograph is targeted at the web manager who wants to create a good web strategy. While specifically aimed mainly for the web manager of public websites, I find much that private commercial web managers will benefit from. Furthermore, I believe the European longer term perspective and careful presentation will be welcomed by webmasters and companies in the U.S.
This 35-page vendor neutral paper spells out clearly and with abundant examples how to engage and understand web strategy obstacles tactically and how to communicate with the correct language and produce effective deliverables within the context of the organization’s structure and politics. It is above all a management document for web managers. Forty percent of its pages are dedicated to its raison d’etre that web strategy is an in-house process involving top management, stakeholders, and others and makes it clear that, although the web team would prefer dealing with tools and technology, the real problems have to do with overall business goals, describing an urgent business need that is web-answerable, defining priorities and establishing meaningful measurements to evaluate the benefit of the implemented web strategy.
Actionable yet many layered and dimensioned, the authors make this also a guide for builders of intranets and provide an external link for alternative advice on how to expedite in special situations and circumstances.
The troubleshooting chart at the close nicely sums up and provides clear pointers. This is an important contribution and I look forward to more publications from this firm.
FYI, one of the co-authors has a blog posting entitled “Creating the perfect web strategy: signs of danger” at http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/creating-the-perfect-web-strategy-signs-of-danger/
Marc Arenstein, April 21, 2009
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