Moving from Web Management to Information Management: Four Things You Can Do Now

A few months ago I was at a conference in Philadelphia and had the pleasure of spending a lot of time talking with Bob Boiko. Bob is the author of the Content Management Bible and one of my favorite books, Laughing at the CIO. I enjoy Bob’s company because he’s a generous person, a great thinker, and he likes to challenge me.  The theme of this particular encounter with Bob was: Why do I call what I do Web Operations Management instead of Information Operations Management? I took Bob’s point and told him that I had asked myself the same question since I started consulting 10 years ago.

My rationale to Bob was practical. I told him that most organizations that we work with have enough trouble trying to manage their Web channel alone and that, often, when I’ve suggested the idea of considering the total information universe (print, Web, mobile, face-to-face, etc.) and managing that holistically, most clients get overwhelmed. So, we help them with what we can and are always on the lookout for that client that might be ready or eager to work on the bigger picture.

Bob is part of a rare breed. He is an academic at heart with a lot of hands-on business experience. So, he accepted my response as valid—although I was left with the friendly impression that he thought I was wimping out.  But, it did get me thinking more concretely about what challenges lie in the chasm between Web management and information management. More specifically, how does a Web manager manage the short-term Web presence while helping the organization move towards a longer term holistic information management vision?  I think there are few simple things you can hold in mind now:

1. Manage the Web channel well and in an open manner. That means when designing and developing for the Web channel, use good practices. There’s a lot of well-meaning but slapdash development going on in Web development circles. Agile development doesn’t mean crappy development. And, when designing interfaces and systems, assume that other systems (information channels, etc.) will flow through and around the Web channel if not now, then in the near future and forever.


2. Look for obvious and simple ways to align and share with other information channels. RSS and a shared taxonomy with a controlled vocabulary are information-sharing manna from heaven. Use them to create quick and light integrations between various Web channels and to share and refer to information.  That could be as simple as using a shared taxonomy to tag content for publication, which could lay the groundwork for deeper integration if required in the future.


3. Stop creating your Web sites in autonomous silos. It was very, very easy for businesses with silo’d business operational practices to fall immediately into a silo’d Web operations management scenario. The result of many different Web development schemes in an organization is, most likely, an incongruent Web presence—maybe difficult to navigate, unsearchable, out of date. Of course, we’ve been talking about the silo’d Web presence for the last fifteen years. And everyone knows it is bad but lots of organizations are still operating in a way that produces a less than optimal site. So, one more time: Stop developing the Web in silos. If you’ve sincerely tried to do this and can’t, it means that you probably have deep operational and cultural undercurrents in your organization that will need to be addressed in order for you to be able to create that unified Web presence your organization needs and your customer and partners want. And, you might need to ring up your CEO to get those changes made.


4. Learn from the older channels. We Web folks are lucky because we’ve got the fastest, sexiest and latest information channel to play around with. But don’t assume that the Web and the Web team have all the knowledge about how to manage information. Web Managers have a lot to learn from librarians, records managers, document managers and more. We’ve also got a lot to learn from business people who know how to manage programs and organizations in order to achieve a goal. And a front-line call center representative could tell you a lot about the appropriate-use cases for interacting with your public, customers and partners.  
   

So, Web Managers must think globally (information) and act locally (Web) all the while trying to widen your universe and build the internal business relationships which will allow your organization to manage its information more holistically now or in the future.