Thursday, July 19, 2007 Meeting Minutes

This month's topic: How Can We Prioritize Our Content?

How can we manage our websites to meet two sometimes opposing goals -- serving as a vast library for government information while providing quick access to our customers' most critical tasks?

News

We've posted our Strategic Plan on Webcontent.gov. It's the 3rd bullet in the News box of the homepage. Please review if you've not yet read it.
Our Steering Committee is working on two documents (which we sent to the Listserv this morning) that expand on the Strategic Plan:
- A Work Plan for the Steering Committee and Task Groups, which outlines the specific actions our community needs to complete to meet the goals outlined in the Strategic Plan;
- A Roadmap to help agencies focus their websites around critical tasks.
We'd like your comments on the Roadmap. Does it make sense? Is it helpful? Are we missing any steps? The Roadmap is intended to guide you through each major milestone in our Work Plan, and identify resources to help you reach each milestone. We recognize that you are probably already working on, or may have completed, many of the steps in this Roadmap. Please check off those things you've already accomplished. Please send your feedback on the Roadmap to Sheila.Campbell and Rachel.Flagg. Thanks!

The Fall 2007 schedule for Web Manager University classes is now available on Webcontent.gov: Registration will open in early August. In the meantime, check the schedule and start to work on your funding requests to attend training.

Introducing the Discussion Topic

How can we manage our websites both as a library and a customer service center? In doing so, how can we prioritize different types of content—tasks/services, news, organizational information, historical and reference documents, etc.

Example: Major online newspapers have effectively adopted this approach—their main site is for breaking news and top tasks, and anything older than a week or so can be accessed in their searchable archive. They know their information architecture and search engine can't keep up with so much content—so they've separated out the "active" and "less active" content.

They've discovered that not all content is created equal. Should we adopt a similar approach?

Issues for Discussion:

Should government websites be giant libraries, information repositories?
Should they focus strictly on critical tasks?
Or can they do both?

Our quick poll this morning overwhelmingly showed that folks in our community think we need to do both (90% of you responded this way). The question then becomes “how can we balance both goals and effectively manage our websites to do both?”

Is one answer to split content into different "buckets," such as news (news.agency.gov), organizational info (about.agency.gov), archival info (archives.agency.gov), and critical tasks/services (main agency site – agency.gov)?

Open Discussion

Q: What kind of management processes do agencies have in place for managing different types of content?

At our agency, one way we split our content is based on audience segmentation. We manage content based on “audience type.”
At the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, we recently finished usability testing to define our main audience groups. We discovered that our main website wasn't connecting with consumers or bank customers. We tried to modify the homepage to include content relevant to them, but people still weren't finding what they needed. So we ended up creating a new site specifically for consumers, and it seems to be doing very well.
One issue is that there's lack of a “process” at many agencies for prioritizing content. Should we talk about establishing a web content management “process” at the federal level? For example, should we set standards for managing the lifecycle of content, establish commonalities in managing our content government-wide, perhaps eventually “standardizing” content management processes across government?
At the EERE (part of the Department of Energy), we have many audiences, consumers and business partners. We have a complex site, and have processes in place for creating new content. For example, if staff want to create a new site, they must complete a "charter"—justify the new site, make sure the content is not already out on the Web, etc.
At IRS, we have a "web publishing request," which serves as justification for posting new content. We have someone who oversees the process to make sure content is current and accurate. We get monthly reports from our content management system (CMS) about when content will expire, orphan files, etc.

Q: Do agencies treat all program offices equally? Do offices get the same amount of real estate even though some offices' content may be more critical than others?

At EERE, yes, each program office gets equal real estate on the home page, and they manage their own sections.
At DHS, folks manage their content on a continuous basis, even if they haven't documented each step of the process. An equally important question is: how can we develop an effective information architecture based on these different content types?
Yes, a big piece of this is the need to standardize our taxonomies. There's a lot of commonality across government content and a lot of us organize our content in several major ways: by topic, audience, and type (service). We need to manage our CONTENT, not "pages."
We need to ensure ALL our information is available. But how do we ensure that people know how to find it? Are search engines taking folks to the best information?

Q: But can we realistically and effectively manage so much information? Do we have too much content out there to do a good job managing everything? We need to figure out how to prioritize where we devote our scarce resources.

At EPA, we have thousands of pages. Things would be so much easier if we started from scratch today—but we have 12 years of content. How can we effectively keep up with it all?
“Looking for information” is really just another task and we need to find a way to help those people get what they need.
It's not just looking for information, but getting them to the right content area – we need to help them find what they need.
Government agencies must be transparent to the public. We need a place to post info about the agency, mission, etc.

Q: How do we define "critical" vs. "non-critical?"

Some say critical shouldn't be based on "visits" and popularity contests.

However, in our Strategic Plan, we define "Critical Task" as something that:

A large number of people need to complete online (in effect, popularity)
Is essential for people to accomplish quickly and easily

That definition works for agencies that deliver services, but doesn't relate to agencies that have many audiences.
At EPA, we're working on our information taxonomy. We have MANY audiences, and we can't say one audience is more important than others. But we use “channels” and try to funnel folks into the right channel for them.

Q: Are there agencies that have recognized that some content is more important than others? If so, have you decided how to manage the less important content? What do you do with the 80 percent of content that only matters to 20 percent of your audience (so you can focus on the content that matters to the 80% of your audience)?

We need to use good search engine optimization (SEO) for "old" or "less-important" content so folks can find it, then let it go, and review it once per year. This will free us up to focus our resources on the more active content on a regular basis. We should include expiration dates for content. Automate as much of this content management process as we can.
Let's look at an example as one way to explain why this is so important. Sometimes you can search for a 2007 conference but all the search engines find is the 2003 conference. Why? How can we relocate 2003 info to an "archive" so it's not the first result? We need to differentiate and tag our content and keep our site maps up-to-date so search engines find the newest or most-relevant content, and relegate older (or less relevant) content to lower priority.
Yes, at our agency we have the challenge of what to do with all the older, lower priority content. We'd like to have the time to review and tag old stuff and put it where it belongs. But program offices devote all their resources to getting out new stuff and don't have time to review old stuff.
At FDIC, we have an annual content review process. We initiated it when we got negative feedback that hardcopy manuals didn't match online versions. So now we review everything to be sure it's all consistent, accurate, and up-to-date.
It's a painful process to clean and cull content and define content owners. We let content owners make the decision about what stays or goes. Web leadership is empowered to manage the homepage, and they put the most “important” information in the most visible places. It's important to archive old stuff, and if you relocate all that old stuff it frees up resources to better manage the new stuff.
You'll find several examples of agencies' web policies on Webcontent.gov, which include some content management processes. If you have other examples you'd like to share, please email Natalie Davidson, Content Manager for Webcontent.gov.

Q: What about "old" content that is still frequently accessed?

One agency said they have several “sites” they've archived. They use metrics to help decide what content people are still using and what content they're not.
Does NARA have guidance on how long should we keep electronic records? (See: our Web Records Page)
Some documents should expire and be put into an archive. But “libraries” are different and serve an important purpose of serving as a central repository for “living” content. The problem is that staff want to post things just because it's “their” content and they think it's important—not because it's important to visitors. That's what we need to better manage... telling people NO.

Q: How can we use metrics to help us better identify critical and less critical content?

For example, will it help us if we learn that, only 4 people looked at this press release, but 1000 people looked at this other piece of content? Will it change the conversation within the agency? Data can help you make the case that some content has a higher priority than others.
Yes, at the State Department, we use these kinds of metrics. We've organized our Visa content based on audience, and we know how many people travel with or without visas. So we organize content based on the number of traveler types and what each type needs, organized to give larger groups more prominence.
There's still a difference between how we organize content and present it to the public – vs. how we manage that content. The way we present information doesn't necessarily need to reflect how we manage it.

Q: Should we investigate working with OMB to develop some government-wide content management standards? Each agency is really doing their own thing now. Is that helping or hurting us?

Mixed response:

Web infrastructure and management are all over the place. But getting some guidelines in place first might be better than starting with OMB.
It's worth pursuing. If people are having a hard time getting program offices and content owners to review old content, there's nothing like an OMB requirement to get folks to comply.
Guidelines must be broad in scope and recognize different agency missions (e.g., there is a huge difference between "library" information vs. people finding out-of-date, inaccurate "old" data that hinders, rather than helps).
Sometimes people WANT an old regulation from 1995. It would be nice if there was some methodology to automatically label content as "superseded by a later version" label, for example.

Wrap-Up

We covered lots of ground on the call. Thanks to everyone for their great insights and also for completing the quick pre-call poll. The survey revealed that we really do need to find a way to manage both critical tasks and content that is lesser priority.
Please send us examples of any policies and procedures that you have in place for managing your content in this way. For example, criteria you use for prioritizing content and checklists for reviewing content.We'd like to post more of these examples on Webcontent.gov.

Next Forum Call

Next month's call is on Thursday, August 16, 2007, from 11 am – 12 pm EST.

To propose a topic for a future Forum call, please contact Sheila Campbell or Rachel Flagg.

Page Updated or Reviewed: January 3, 2008