Partnering to Create a University Web Site

The World Wide Web has grown faster than anyone predicted. The Web has even grown faster than my great-grandmother's little kudza plant. When at the beginning of this century she put that one little plant on her front porch she did not realize that some 50 years later her grandson and great-grandson would have to fence in nearly twenty acres of land so that cattle could remove the menace of the jack-in-bean-stalk plant. None of us know where the Web will be in 50 years or what it will be like but we do now how much it has grown to this point. The number of web servers has grown from only a few hundred in the fall of 1993 to almost 1.5 million by the fall of 1997 (Zakon, 1997). This unprecedented growth has caused many organizations to be caught short and looking for strategies to create web sites. This paper lays out some of the problems inherent in organizations that are complicating factors in creating web sites and suggest a strategy for dealing with these complications.

This paper will accomplish the goal by looking at organizational decision making, explaining why partnering is desirable, and listing the characteristics of a successful Web team.

Many models of organizations have been developed over the years. I will present two models that find particularly relevant to universities and the Web. The first of these models is that of Cohen, March and Olsen (1972) and has been referred to as the garbage can model. What this model essentially says is that all information from an organization gets dumped into a garbage can. This information includes not only information relevant to the problem at hand but all the other baggage of the organization. This additional baggage can include everything from personal agendas, other projects, and what is being served in the company cafeteria that day. The point being in order to come to a timely decision the garbage must first be sorted and this can be problematic since there is almost always someone who thinks their trash is more important than yours. The second model is presented by Karl Weick in his book The Social Psychology of Organizing (1979). Weick presents a model of decision making as the reduction of equivocality or uncertainty. One of Weick's contentions is that organizations make decisions by the process of eliminating options. The more alternatives available the greater the amount of time required to reach a decision since more alternatives must be eliminated. In many organizations the number of alternatives is so great that the decisions are not reached by a rational process but by other factors such as time making the decision. Frequently over time the number of alternatives available is reduced by factors outside and inside the organizations. The organization that does not have a systematic decision making strategy is often forced into positions by circumstances that were not chosen and may not be desirable. Universities fit another characteristics that Weick suggest that of loosely coupled structures. Loose coupling implies groups within organizations that may have conflicting goals but that are still tied to an overall institutional goal. These conflicting goals tied to loose coupling making decision making even slower compounding the first of Weick's suggested problems.

I would like to suggest a partnering approach to overcome some of the problems inherent with organizations to cope with the special needs of web development. The web site of a university affects the entire university therefore input is need from many sources. The development of a web site requires a set of skills usually not maintained within any single organization on a university campus. These factors coupled with the need to move quickly I feel require that a university have a web team composed of members from various organizations on campus that can quasi-independently make decisions and move forward with implementation in a timely fashion.

What kind of people should you put on your web team? Laura Lemay (Narayan, 1996) noted author of books on web publishing makes some suggestions. She suggests that you put at least the combination of the four following types: 1) a writer, 2) a programmer, 3) a designer, and 4) a curious person. In the article she goes into depth describing the roles that each of these people take on but the crux of the article is to focus on communication skills not on technical skills. I would like to relate some of the experience we have had at Vanderbilt to demonstrate the effectiveness of this team or partnering approach.

At Vanderbilt when the web site was first established it was created by the staff of Academic Computing and Information Resources(ACIS). The initial site consisted of little more than a home page with links to other web sites already available at the university such as the School of Engineering and the Medical Center. This home page was plain in appearance being little more than a list with a graphic at the top. The home page evolved into a longer list which became unwieldy that in later incarnations had to be collapsed. A set of second level pages of lists where developed to connect to the short list. At this point in the development of the web site those of us in ACIS had noticed many very nicely laid out web sites but lacked the graphic design skills to make it happen on our own.

The University Publications and Design Office and the Office of News and Public Affairs were contacted to in an effort to find personnel who could help not only with the design of web pages but with the content. Since those initial contacts a very effective working relationship has developed and a team of web workers has been established to move the Vanderbilt web site forward and to constantly look for ways to improve. The team consists of primarily two people who main duties relate to the web but who can call on others for help. The two people are the webmaster from ACIS who handles many of the day to day chores of the web and a designer from Publication and Design who is responsible for the look and feel of the main Vanderbilt web pages. In addition to these two people others from ACIS are involved in the technical management of the web site including server maintenance, hardware and software upgrades, account management, etc. Additional personnel are available from Publication and Design and the Office of News and Public Affairs for editorial content. This group of people is under the oversight of a pair of University committees that look at the web site from one and policy point of view and two a more technological point of view.

The web team meets the challenge of maintaining a web site by having the following characteristics.

• Members are from different parts of campus therefore responsive to different needs.
• Members possess the variety of skills needed to develop and maintain the web site.
• Members are focused on the day to day problems associated with the web site.
• The team is small enough and empowered enough to be able to make decisions and implement them in a timely fashion, often within a matter of hours or less.

The team in this fashion meets many of challenges suggested by both the garbage can model and the work of Weick. The Vabderbukt web team creates and maintains only the top levels of the web site. If your web team is going to create the content for the entire university it would require many more people working full time in order to develop that content.

At Vanderbilt each unit of the university is responsible for there web content. While some units are large enough to develop their own web teams many are not. These have-nots can be helped in a variety of ways and the main university web team has the responsibility of providing some of this assistance. The Publication and Design office provides design and editorial help to units creating their own web pages. ACIS provides web space, HTML training, consulting, and software tools for web development. The team provides a set of university guidelines for the development of web pages.

In summary, large complex organizations are almost the opposite of the World Wide Web. Organizations change slowly and make decisions only after a laborious process in which all voices can be heard. The World Wide Web is dynamic, constantly growing and changing. In order to cope with web site development and maintenance in an organization a small team that can make decision and move quickly is needed.

The team approach is a viable solution because it considers:

• Multiple constituencies
• a variety of skills, and
• the need for rapid deployment.

Always remember given the number of people that anyone working on a major web project is attempting to keep happy it is imperative tha you maintain your sense of humor.

Cohen, Michael D., James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen. 1972. A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice. Administrative Science Quarterly 17, no. 1 (March 1972): 1-25.

Narayan , Shoba 1996. HTML Book Guru Downplays Tech Role: Laura Lemay emphasizes content, skills . Web Week, Volume 2, Issue 8, June 17, 1996

Weick, Karl E. 1979. The Social Psychology of Organizing. 2nd ed. Random House: New York.

Zakkon, Robert H. 1997. Hobbes' Internet Timeline v3.1. (http://www.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html)