In June President Obama took to the airwaves to announce an ambitious campaign to reduce waste. The Campaign to Cut Waste sought to identify pointless Federal spending and eliminate it as rapidly as possible. As of June, as much as $33B was estimated as potential savings.
During the announcements The President also talked about a broad plan to review the number of Federal websites and take down or consolidate those that were pointless. As an example of "silly spending" he pointed to the Fiddlin Fiddlers as a "ridiculous program." In what became the signature line of the launch. President Obama famously said:
"I’ll put their music on my iPod, but I’m not paying for their website!"
And sure enough, don’t try to find that site online today, you will only see the following message:
Sorry, "www.fiddlinforesters.gov" is unavailable or could not be found.
Fast forward to July. Fed CIO Vivek Kundra launched a 17 member task force to review what turns out to be more than 24,000 Federal Government web sites, and come up with a plan for streamlining them. The notion of “one single gov web site” was even floated
In a live video chat on the White House web site. Kundra, Sheila Campbell, head of the General Service's Administration's digital government division, and White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips talked more about this initiative. They also took questions from the community using Twitter and the hashtag #dotgov, where the conversation continues today.
We were pleased to see that Percussion client healthcare.gov was held out as a model for what is possible in government web sites. Our work with a number of Federal agencies including the General Services Administration (usa.gov) and Health and Human Services (healthcare.gov, cancer.gov, and aids.gov, among others) give us an insider’s perspective on this important initiative.
Based on our experiences, there are four things that we highlight as areas of opportunity for Federal Agencies as they review their web strategies, particularly in light of the ongoing effort to drive even greater Government to Citizen interactivity.
- Standardizing one web content management infrastructure across the agency: Standardizing the infrastructure under one enterprise license results in synergies and shared best practices, repositories, and other components, while also keeping costs down on licensing multiple platforms.
- Moving to the Cloud for website delivery – Moving to a cloud infrastructure speeds website delivery, reduces the number of servers required to run the site, and eases access to content. This represents a strong candidate for compliance with the “Cloud First” initiative launched last year as many agencies have already determined.
- Separating content infrastructure from web delivery infrastructure – Just as in the commercial sector, the Citizen is demanding information and interactivity in new ways and are adopting new technologies at an ever increasing speed. As was said in the web cast, Government agencies are challenged to prepare for the web of the future, not just catching up to today. Separating content from delivery allows agencies to focus on delivering even more content to citizens across the widest number of channels. As the web rate of change accelerates, this gives agencies the freedom to adopt new channels (such as Google +), without ripping out existing web delivery infrastructure. That would only create more costs, not less.
- Ensuring reusability of Content -- Having a standardized WCM infrastructure, deploying content in the Cloud and separating content from delivery, enables easier and more nimble reuse, access, and delivery of content across sites. This allows for quicker and timelier delivery of information and enables agencies to deliver better information services to their constituents.
We will provide more details on Percussion’s Four Point Plan in the coming days. In addition to working with our customers across the Federal Government on this initiative, we are also looking at the great ideas being proposed through Twitter to hear what the community as a whole has to say.
We look forward to sharing more with you!
Related reading:
The White House Blog
If you are buying a software product, how much work should you expect to install the software and get it operational in your organization? What is an acceptable ratio of services to licenses? And at what point are you no longer actually buying software, but rather a framework that you customize for the specific needs of your company?
This is an oft debated question in the software community and it varies by the type of application of course. In the web content management software market, an acceptable rule of thumb was 3 or 4 service dollars to $1 in license costs. But this number appears to be rising rapidly. The Real Story Group reports that they are seeing much higher ratios. Seth Gotleib writes that he is seeing as high as 7 or 8 to 1. We have seen this ourselves in competing proposals for web content management projects.
But is that a good thing? Should customers simply “expect that kind of multiplier and budget for it” as both Adriaan and Scott imply in their articles? Is that just the price of buying enterprise software today?
To me, those kind of multiples signal that you are actually buying a Framework and not a product. Frameworks in short are highly extensible software foundations that according to PC Magazine: “take the tedium out of writing all the program code for an application from scratch.”
But why is that a bad thing in web content management? After all, this is a sophisticated technology with complex business cases, and every company has their own view of how best to manage the infrastructure of their web site. Many companies are happy to learn that they can bend the products to meet their very specific needs.
This is a problem for two very important reasons:
Upgrades: If the application framework is highly customized for your business, upgrading to take advantage of “what’s next on the web” is going to range from very difficult to impossible. New features that are developed by the vendor are not going to make their way into your install without significant work on your part. And anytime you want to make changes, your team is going to have to either go back to the original integrator, or the web dev team is going to have to devote significant time to making those updates.
Kitchen Sink Mentality: Seth frames this problem incredibly well, though he meant it differently:
Every new feature and option requires design, configuration/customization, testing, and management. The market is buying potential and the vendors are selling it — but realizing that potential isn’t free.
Because of the cost and complexity traditionally involved with deploying a WCMS, companies try to buy enough technology to last them the next 3-5 years. Which leads the company to buy more potential than they actually need, adding even more complexity. They had better get it all in the deployment now, or they are going to have to wait 3-5 years. Then, since they haven’t been upgrading their application along the way (see point #1 above) they are essentially looking to start the whole process all over again.
Instead, we recommend that when evaluating your strategy for web content management, consider how much product you are actually buying. Consider what a high services engagement costs today, but also what that means for cost, complexity and flexibility in the future years.
Given that the “Web rate of change” continues to accelerate rapidly, it is a bad idea to trap yourself in a custom application that you can’t upgrade/update. Trying to guess at what you will need in 3 years and deploying it today is a lot like gambling: you might guess right a few times, but over the long run, the house always wins.
