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May 17, 2007 Meeting Minutes

Web Content Managers Forum Minutes: May 17, 2007

Approximately 80 people on the call

Charter for our group

Sheila Campbell of the USA.gov Web Best Practices Team opened the call with an overview of the Web Content Managers Forum, the mission and the organization. The Forum is responsible for the Forum Listserv, Webcontent.gov, Web Manager University, the Web Best Practice Awards, and the Web Content Managers Workshops. The steering committee, which manages the forum, is working on a charter for our community that will outline how we’re organized and how all our subgroups fit together. Our current focus is getting consensus on our strategic plan and implementing activities that will help us all improve our government websites and our customers’ most critical tasks online.

We’ll share the Forum Charter with all members in a couple of weeks to solicit your feedback. In the meantime, here’s a quick overview for those of you who’ve had questions about how we’re organized:

Steering Committee:

Executive Sponsor: Bev Godwin (Director, USA.gov Operations)

Co-chairs: Sheila Campbell (USA.gov) and Rachel Flagg (HUD)

Members:

Natalie Davidson (USA.gov)

Kate Donohue (Treasury)

Gwynne Kostin (Homeland Security)

Joe Pagano (Library of Congress)

Rand Ruggieri (Commerce)

Task groups and facilitators:

Web Governance: Rand Ruggieri (Dept. of Commerce)

Usability, Design, and Accessibility: Nicole Burton (USA.gov) and Beth Martin (HHS)

Training and Development: Randy Eltringham (DOD), Eric Ramoth (HUD)

Web Metrics: Joe Pagano (Library of Congress) and Brian Dunbar (NASA)

Technology and Innovation: Rezaur Rahman (Advisory Council on Historic Preservation)

Task groups will work on projects that support the Critical Tasks Initiative (for example, the metrics group will work on standard metrics to measure critical tasks). If you’re interested in participating on a task group, contact the facilitator(s) listed above. We’ll follow up with an email to the listserv with more details about how you can get involved.

Follow-up to Web Managers Workshop and Date for Next Year

• Our annual workshop on April 24 was a huge success. We continue to get very positive feedback and want to thank forum members for the excellent suggestions for how we can make the next one even better.
• We’ve posted the speaker presentations, contact information for the exhibitors, and handouts on Webcontent.gov.
• We plan to have the next workshop at FDIC in Arlington, VA, the week of April 21, 2008 (probably the Tuesday or Wednesday that week). Mark your calendar.
• We'll likely have a day of pre- and/or post-workshop sessions, so those of you outside DC may want to plan to be here for 2-3 days.

Web Managers Strategic Plan

We published the Forum Strategic Plan on our wiki last month, but we didn’t receive much feedback. So we want to use today’s call to be sure everyone is behind the plan.

Many callers expressed support of the plan. It will help individual web managers to show their top management that there’s a whole community behind the plan—and that they’re not alone in trying to focus on customers’ top tasks. Having this kind of published and publicized strategic plan will help web managers convince their agencies that they need to reorient their sites around customer tasks—not around a particular message or individual pieces of information.

Although there’s support for the goal of focusing on critical tasks, there are still lots of questions as to how to actually implement it. Identifying top tasks is not as easy as it sounds sometimes. Getting ongoing feedback and a continuing dialogue with our users is important, but it can be hard, especially with the current OMB restrictions from the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires agencies to go through a clearance process before surveying and collecting information from the public. There are also encryption and security issues.

The steering committee is working on a more detailed work plan to accompany the strategy plan. A big piece of that is a communications strategy to help us determine how to market the critical tasks initiative within our agencies and also with key external stakeholder groups. If anyone has suggestions for how we should do this kind of communications and outreach, please let Sheila or Rachel know.

Another challenge around top tasks is how to identify your audience, especially when you have widely differing audiences that come to your site. Critical tasks may vary by audience group. It’s a problem for agencies where everybody is considered to be the audience. It was suggested that agencies with this challenge do some analysis to determine these different audience groups and identify the top tasks for each group. We can, and should, develop additional guidance on this and provide some examples from agencies you’ve done this well.

One aspect of the strategic plan that wasn’t directly addressed is the question of consolidation. With 24,000 websites, should we consider consolidation like the U.K. is doing? Several callers commented that the issue of consolidation, at least in the immediate future, would be best addressed through focusing on critical tasks, best practices, and standardization across current websites. Consolidation might be a good long-term goal, and adhering to standards and best practices will make that goal more achievable as we move forward. Some mentioned that it’s more important to focus on getting tasks right rather than move to a standard look and feel.

Another important piece is the need to clean up clutter on our government websites. If we don’t do that, it will make it very difficult to focus on the top tasks, since we’ll be devoting so many resources to maintaining huge, unmanageable websites that continue to grow. Having solid information architecture, taxonomies, and good content review processes may help us control growth and clutter.

Results of the Critical Tasks Survey

Rachel Flagg summarized the critical tasks survey results. Nearly 120 web managers completed the survey, which was a great response. Many respondents commented on the need for more guidance to identify and improve critical tasks.

Again, many people cited obstacles such as the Paperwork Reduction Act restrictions on collecting information from the public.

Callers discussed several strategies for how to get customer data that will help us identify top tasks. Suggestions included: talking directly to users at in-person service centers and events, finding out what people are looking for when they call the agency, using standard metrics, and having usability experts. One way to get more people trained in usability and user-centered design is to draft graduate-level interns who study usability.

Jeffrey Levy from the EPA talked about their content review process and how they use it to improve their customers’ top tasks. At EPA, they talk to the subject matter experts throughout the agency (like experts on water or pesticides) who communicate regularly with the public about their needs and top tasks in that given topic area. The idea is to put yourself in the shoes of the people coming to your site: what are they coming to your site to accomplish, what are the steps they need to go through to accomplish that task, etc. They’re seeking to complete a task, not looking at your content as a collection of information. You need to organize and write your content accordingly.

The survey included some great examples of how agencies should collaborate on identifying and delivering top tasks. This is a critical piece. If agencies do top tasks in isolation, it won’t improve service to our customers. There are some portals that reflect this collaboration (such as grants.gov), but we need to do more.

Next Steps

• The steering committee will publish and publicize the strategic plan, based on the positive consensus we got on the call to move forward.
• We’ll continue to devote future forum calls to sharing specific strategies for how to identify, measure, and deliver top tasks.
• The steering committee and task groups will continue to develop resources and share best practices around top tasks.
• If you have examples of how you’ve successfully identified, measured, or delivered top tasks—or collaborated with other agencies—please share with the whole community or send to Rachel and Sheila.
• We’ll work on the detailed work plan that outlines specific tasks and dates and share with the entire forum listserv after mid-June.
• The next forum call is scheduled for June 21 at 11 am EDT.

 

Page Updated or Reviewed: May 25, 2007