Why I’m Disgusted with Web Teams

By Lisa Welchman (@cmswire) Sep 7, 2007

What’s it gonna take to get organizations to take their web sites seriously? By seriously I mean staff them, fund them and manage them?

I’m beginning to believe that some newsworthy misinformation-on-the-Web or ecommerce-related revenue losing incident may be the only way that some organizations, both public and private, are going pay attention to the fact that their Web products are an embarrassment and, sometimes, a liability. Is that what it’s going to take? Some unlucky organization’s got to get caught with their Web pants down?

Web People and Web Management

In 1997 I was working on the Web team at Cisco Systems. The public website was serviced by several different groups within the organization and we were constantly battling about who was in charge (sound familiar?).

I only mention Cisco by name not to name drop but because it’s significant to my gripe: Cisco Systems, the first big retailers of multiprotocol routers. Cisco gets the internet. Cisco gets the Web. Cisco has a vested business interest in having the Web work for every breathing human on the planet. Cisco would be the first to put the internet on Mars (if it’s not already there).

But, Cisco still had a lot problems managing their website. Why? Because managing a large Web presence is less about understanding the potential and possibility of technology and more about sound operations and management practices — creating an environment where people work together to create a quality product.

Web People (this is a special breed of people who were drawn to work with Web technologies during the Web’s commercial proliferation in the 1990s) have many strengths. But establishing sound operating practices and sound management principles don’t seem to be among them.

Web people are good at flying by the seat of their pants, doing the impossible overnight for demanding and technologically clueless managers, inventing new products out of new technologies, and complaining about being under appreciated and overworked… but not great about clearly explaining to managers why the organization is at risk because of the low quality of the organization’s Web products.

In short, Web People are not good managers. It hurts me to say this because I feel like I’m dissing my own people. But, I think it’s for the greater good.

Web Management Demands Technical Literacy

The Web needs to be managed and it needs to be managed by people who understand not just the Web but also business operations and product quality. Unfortunately, this is not a description of many of the plain old vanilla business school manager types we see in organizations.

A lot of managers we work with have an aversion to any knowledge that might be construed as specialized. I’m generalizing to make a point. There’s a general view that mangers don’t actually need to do anything (particularly anything technical)… that would be for subject experts and individual practitioners — not managers.

But not doing something is a lot different than not understanding what you’re managing. Not understanding what you’re managing is bad management. And there is a lot of bad management happening around websites.

So, on the one hand you have technically-literate but managerially-illiterate individual contributors who know that the organization’s website is a ticking time bomb. And, on the other hand, you have technically-illiterate but managerially-literate managers who just want to be able to report up that everything is “just fine” with the site.