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01.03.06
Raising The Perceived Value Of Your Website
 By
Gerry McGovern
Perception is everything. Right now, most senior managers do not perceive that
content delivers significant value.
I recently was in a meeting with a senior manager from a large organization. The
purpose of the meeting was to present a new strategy for the intranet. It had
taken eight months of hard work to make such a meeting happen.
A process had begun earlier in the year to convince a whole range of stakeholders
that a new strategy was required. Carefully, a business case was built, and the
need for change was outlined.
Within a few minutes of the meeting starting, the senior manager made the following
observation: "This is a management challenge."
Strange as it might seem, I have rarely seen content management being accepted
as a management discipline. Most people who 'manage' websites have little authority.
They are, in reality, website administrators. They put stuff up. Content that
is administered rarely delivers value.
To maximize value you must publish high-quality content (killer web content).
That requires significant skill and active management. Low quality content is
easy to get. Just have junior people pump your intranet with whatever they can
find. Give authors control and let them publish what they want.
The senior manager recognized that without proper management, the intranet would
fail to deliver value. He was willing to invest in proper management; hiring professionals,
training staff, setting standards, and measuring rigorously. He was prepared to
do this because he had been convinced that the intranet had the potential to deliver
much more value.
Value is at the core of the content management challenge. Low-quality content
destroys value, and there is a lot of low-quality content out there. How do you
measure value? Task completion. How many of your readers completed a task as a
result of your content?
It's not easy to measure task completion for content. You need to do a lot of
observation of your customers; a lot of usability.
Every year, an understanding of the value that the Web can deliver grows. More
and more organizations are investing in the Web because they can quantify the
return. Others have come to realize that the return is not there. For them, a
brochure website is all that they need.
As a web manager, what you don't want to occur is to have your website perceived
as delivering less value than it actually does. Most senior managers start off
with the belief that the Web contributes little to value creation, so you've got
some convincing to do.
It is up to you to slowly raise their awareness. Senior managers set the value
agenda. Get them on your side and you will receive more support and resources,
thus allowing you to create even more value.
If you want to deliver value from content you must treat it as a management activity.
You need to grow the content management expertise within your organization. That
is the path of value.
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