You Are Here: The Political Layer

One of my favorite t-shirts is a geeky play on the seven OSI layers of networking. This shirt basically emphasizes that sure there are all these technical aspects that many of us are supposed to be working on (and perhaps learned about in college), but we all spend a lot of our time on political and other people-based layers (see also Layer 8). Regardless of what your job is nominally, there is always the political layer you have to deal with.

Web Operations Management (WOM) attempts to put a structure in place for running your Web presence, which navigates the political realities of your organization. Instead of pretending these realities don't exist, you can explicitly define the  WOM Strategy, Web Governance, and Web Execution that such that it fits within your political environment. By setting these structures in place, this can also mean that you get political cover from higher up rather than being tossed about in the wind by the loudest voices asking for changes to your site (for instance, you could potentially appeal to a higher-level governance body about why you cannot make a requested change).