Outsourcing Decisions

Website Development Best Practices

Client Challenge:A client of ours recently asked us to help them find out the Best Practices for the development, maintenance and support of the websites of any corporate entity, in general, and that of a Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in particular. More specifically:

1. What should be the roles and responsibilities of the user and IT departments for the Development of the company’s website?

2. What role the user and IT departments. should have in the decision to outsource the design, development and support of the company’s website?

3. Who decides about the service provider IT or the user department? 4. What are the relevant best practices?

5. What are the SLAs to be followed?

6. What are the “no-go” areas for the IT and for the users in the Design, Development, Maintenance, Support and Content Management of the company’s website?

7. What are the overlapping/gray areas for the IT and user departments in the Design, Development, Maintenance, Support and Content Management of the company’s website?

ETS Opinion: A website is the company's face to the public, its employees, existing and potential customers, and partners.

To undertake the creation or re-creation of the website, executives (both the users and IT) should clearly understand the corporate mission, business objectives, and those who comprise the audience. In addition, corporate Websites should be aligned with the goals and objectives of upper management as well as the needs and requirements of those who will use it.

Roles and Responsibilities

What should be the roles and responsibilities of the user and IT departments for the Development of the company’s website? Starts at the Top

To develop a successful corporate Website, it is imperative that the directive come from upper management and not necessarily one line of business (i.e., one user) or the IT department. It is upper management that decides on the goals of the company and the way in which it wished to present itself to customers, partners, employees, and/or the public. In the same way, it is upper management that must decide the roles users and IT will play.

Partnered Involvement

Experture suggests that a Steering Committee composed of both IT and key/empowered user executives must have accountability for the success or failure of the website. This should not be IT. IT can be a stakeholder and should be involved according to its roles and responsibility. The members of the steering committee are stakeholders that should clearly understand what is required, clearly communicate what is needed to whoever will design and develop the website(s), provide ongoing guidance, and hold participants accountable.

Experture Group

Outsourcing Decisions

What role the user and IT departments should have in the decision to outsource the design, development and support of the company’s website?

Design

Most enterprises do not have a staff with sufficient skill to design websites nor do they want one. Website design that encompasses some of the newer technology is a specialty. The designers need to work together with both IT and user resources to make sure that the website meets the user’s requirements as well as providing an understanding by IT of how it achieves those goals.

Development

After the design is completed, Experture suggests that internal IT resources lead the website development, but work in close conjunction with external design specialists. It is evident that design and development overlap.

Support

For the most part, the support of the website is the responsibility of IT. Experture suggests that the design specialists be brought back in if significant changes need to be made.

General Decision Criteria

The decision to outsource really must be based on a number of key factors:

 Budget - What is the cost to develop and maintain the Website(s) in-house or to outsource? Depending on the cost during the website’s lifecycle, it might be prudent to outsource.

 Talent - Is IT capable of effectively designing, developing, implementing, and supporting the Website(s)? Obviously, a lot of what IT takes on is dependent on existing resources and capabilities. One financial service enterprise that had an internal “Publishing Services” department developed a design function that was able to work with the IT function to develop their intranet. In this case, both the Internet and Extranet design was performed by external consulting firms.

 Infrastructure - Are there sufficient servers, space, bandwidth, and connectivity to support the Website(s)? The decision to “outsource” the hosting of the website depends on internal capacity as well as interconnectivity with existing systems. For example, a “brochure” internet website that does not rely on data from other systems can more easily be hosted externally than an intranet that relies on information from HR and/or Finance.

 Security - If customers are going to perform transactions on the website, who is better equipped to provide this. The same is true about corporate intranets in which the company's financial records will be able to be queried by users. These have to be secure.

Service Provider/Partner Decisions

Who decides about the service provider IT or the user department?

Experture suggests that IT should identify various service providers and present those to the Steering Committee for review and final decision. The Steering Committee should delegate the task of researching the service provider or outsourcer to IT because IT is more likely to understand the nuances involved here, but the ultimate selection should be made by the Steering Committee.

Experture notices that the client interchangeably uses the terms outsourcer and service provider. It must be made clear (up-front) what the client wishes to have done and by whom. For example, will the selected outsourcer do all the design and implementation and also host the website? Will the design and implementation be done by one company and then hosted by another service provider?

Best Practices

What are the relevant best practices?

 Staff – Both user and IT must have strong project management skills. No matter how the various phases of the project are resourced, the enterprise must maintain the project management role.

 Communication – As in any enterprise-wide initiative, there has to be clear, concise and constant communication. Project management 101 recommends that periodic meetings be held with both the delivering resources as well as the Steering Committee.

 Cost-Benefit Analysis – should be conducted to determine how the various phases will be resourced.  Needs Analyses – as a part of the user

requirements part of the project, a needs analysis should be performed. The following questions should be answered:

a. What will be/should be the goal of Website?

b. What problem(s) is it trying to solve?

c. Does the project have endorsement from upper management?

d. What are the available resources for such a project?

e. Is the goal consistent with the resources that are available for such a project?

f. Has/will a project manager, who is accountable to upper management, been assigned?

g. If users from other lines of business are asked to work on the project, do

they understand their

responsibilities, the timeline, and prioritization of the project vis-à-vis their other duties?

h. If an outsourcer or service provider is to be used, have they been carefully vetted?

i. Have SLAs been agreed upon and put in place?

 Clearly Delineated Goals and Objectives - For example, investment in a corporate website could help a company increase profit, reduce costs, better service customers, provide better communications, increase efficiency, become more competitive in the marketplace, attract more customers, eliminate redundancy, support a long-term strategy, etc.

 Task Force – The Steering Committee should create a small, but permanent, task force of line of business users should to periodically review complaints about navigability, prolonged response times, and queries or problems that are not acknowledged. The task force should determine the validity of complaints and create an action plan to resolve the issues.

Service Level Agreements

Whether the design, development, implementation, hosting and/or support of a website is to be outsourced or if IT will be charged with any or all of these tasks, SLAs should be created. In addition, SLA parameters are the same whether they are maintained from internal or external resources.

The terms and associated metrics of the SLA are determined based on the requirements of the audience being targeted. The following table provides some examples of how metrics are affected based on the expectations of the website.

Websites Internet Intranet Extranet

Audience General Public

Internal Staff External Customers Sample Functions General information about company’s products & services Internal support functions like phone book, access to personal HR/benefit information, internal announcements Access to personalized customer statements, reports, etc., Key Service Level Objective Access 24x7; Uptime 99%; Access during working hours; Uptime 95%; Access 24x7; Uptime 99.999%; Rationale While it is important that the website be available, it is not business critical; While it is important that the website is available, most of the time it is not business critical; It is very important that customers have access to their services all of the time;

Roles and Responsibilities

The "go" and "no-go" areas must be decided up-front by the stakeholders. It is a mistake not to decide on the roles a priori because there will be problems later on and the website will not be successful or it will take more time and money.

Based on Experture’s position in the first part of the response, it is IT’s responsibility to make sure that all of the decisions that have been made by the Steering Committee are carried out properly. Second, it is IT’s responsibility that although they may not be fully responsible for all phases, they must be aware of what is going on at all times. It is responsible to make sure that the appropriate technologies get used in the website as well as making sure that any architecture decisions will allow the business to achieve its goals and to scale as needed.

Up-front, the users need to make sure that their requirements are fully communicated. They also need to attend and participate in all project meetings and to make decisions on a timely basis. They are also responsible to participate in the testing of the websites to make sure that their requirements have been implemented as expected.

Overlapping Responsibilities

What are the overlapping/gray areas for the IT and user departments; in the Design, Development, Maintenance, Support and Content Management of the company’s website?

There are two ways to view this question:  How to prevent overlaps?

 What are the shared responsibilities of the involved parties?

The first question is easily answered by formalizing the responsibilities at the beginning of the project.

The second question is a little more involved. Most projects are successful when all of the participants recognize the role everyone plays, but share in the overall responsibility of the project.

In the design phase, it is important for IT to bring their experience into the discussions to make sure that the appropriate technology is being used. IT is also responsible to make sure that the inherent flow from one part of the site to the other makes sense in terms of standards. The user is responsible to make sure that the design meets their needs and the workflow is logical by supporting their business processes.

In the development phase, IT is responsible for making sure that technology standards are being used and that the end-product will allow whatever interaction with other databases and systems as required. The users are responsible for participating in unit testing to see if the component functions as required. IT is responsible during unit testing to make sure the website functions according to standards.

In the maintenance and support phases, the user is again responsible for communicating their requirements. IT is responsible for taking those requirements and translating them into system changes. Both IT and the user are responsible for testing the change prior to going into production.

Content Management is primarily the responsibility of the user. However, IT is responsible for making sure that there is sufficient capacity, and that the content is protected via backups and archiving. Overlap may occur depending on who administers the content. In some cases, it may be IT or the user.

In any case, Experture strongly suggests that IT and the users work together in all phases of the website lifecycle.

The Bottom Line:The creation of a successful corporate Website, whether it is an Internet site, an intranet, and/or an extranet, begins with one or more predefined and clearly expressed and understand goals that are aligned with the corporate vision.

A strategy for implementation that is consistent with a pre-formulated budget, understanding of existing talent and resources, clear delineation of roles and responsibilities, excellent project management and tracking, and communication skills are also imperative.