MMP5: Starting a Web Office from Scratch: Trials and Tales

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Matt Herzberger: So my name is Matt Herzberger. This is Nick DeNardis. A little bit of background. We never actually met in person until we were having beers at the bar last night. This is our first in-person collaboration.

Just a little bit of background on this. I'd talked to a couple of different kind of people that had started up Web offices at different times or different parts of their Web office. Nick has a completely different function structure than I do, so we're hoping that... His group is kind of, they focus on core functions and they are a services group, and I guess I'm kind of a lazy group because I just get a function on core things without actually having to help anyone else out. So it's great. Go ahead, Nick.

Nick DeNardis: Well, yeah, I guess... And the other thing is that you have a kind of mandate that you guys get to put upon the university, whereas our department doesn't have a mandate.

All we get to do is influence everybody out in the schools and colleges and departments and things and we really have to push widely used standards and things like that instead of being able to, say, take down a site that's purple and has blinking colors and stuff like that on it. So, yeah, there's definitely two completely different approaches here as far as what our departments do and how we do it.

Matt Herzberger: You want to have the first slide?

Nick DeNardis: All right. So I guess... Let's see here. 'Committees, Policies and Guidelines'. Let's see. This is every university's Web department, and pretty much it seems like it's not so bad with print, but definitely with Web where it can reach so many people so quickly that everybody wants to, well, have their say in something and have it be well-branded. And everybody wants to be able to touch everything in case it's a success, so they can show that they affected the success.

And it's really an, I guess, insane way to think about things because it's so easy to change as far as the Web is concerned. Something doesn't work? Just switch it up and it will work based on kind of what things have been going, what kind of numbers you've been getting from things.

Let's see here. Yes. So, really, it's about getting the right people in the right rooms at the right times under the right kind of conditions. And so creating, as far as like my office is concerned, the people that need to be on board are the ones that are--I hate to say--going to be paying for the services because my group is not generally funded.

Well, it's only generally funded for admission type stuff, but everything else, we actually charge the different departments on campus for our services. Although it's about a fifth or a tenth of what kind of a vender would charge, we still charge and we still kind of put that monetary value against our services as far as, "Oh, you want to add these 10 features? Well, this is going to cost as much, this is going to cost as much."

So, there isn't an actual impact to the decisions that deans, directors, department heads are making. And so those people at least are the ones that we need in the room to actually make the decisions because it's coming out of their pockets. And to them, budget is everything, especially now when it's getting cut more and more.

Matt Herzberger: One of the experiences that I'm having right now is, there was the compliance group, which is never the right person to start this conversation, but they started this... they're calling it like a 'Web standards policy committee' or something like that, which to me Web standards is one thing and to them it's a completely different thing.

But the funny thing is, I got this email sent from the compliance office, which is a lawyer, and there are all these people copied on it that are going to be part of the committee, and I have never heard a single one of the people's names. And I was, like, "Well, I would think this has something to do with Web people." I started asking my boss, and it was all suits. It was lawyers, it was executives, it was all these people. And I'm just, like, "Oh, my God. I'm getting sucked into my first committee."

[Laughter]

Matt Herzberger: You know, it's something that thus far I've been able to avoid like the plague, and I'm going to try and continue to do that. Committees are good when they serve a certain function, but when they dictate where you're going, if they hinder as opposed to enable, I think it's one of the things that's really, really hard about working with them.

For example, like, Web kind of governance, we were supposed to sort of set up a committee, but instead, I just set up a group. We call it U-Web and it's just a general group that kind of has oversight. But again, it doesn't dictate where things go because I don't really want to have to answer to some group with a bunch of people that really should not be the influencers and the stakeholders when it comes to this stuff.

OK. This was one of the ones that I added in because this has been the hardest part of my job so far. It's the thing that I deal with day in and day out the most. It's the thing that made me start liking scotch a lot.

[Laughter]

Matt Herzberger: So, a little bit of background. I've been on my new job for about six months. I was brought on to sort of start up a core Web group on campus. As part of that function, there was already another Web group on campus, so it's like automatically turf war the day I get there. And I came in with 'I want to work with you guys' thing, and they came in with a 'No, he doesn't. He just wants to get us all fired' type of mentality.

And going back, we were going to actually have people jump in with their experiences. I kind of forgot that part of it. Does anybody have anything to sort of add on the last slide about committees, policies? Any good experiences that you have? Any questions of where they've killed you, where they've helped you? Things like that.

Audience 1: Matt? I'm really happy for you and all. I'm going to let you finish. I'm going to let you finish.

[Laughter]

Audience 1: But their team is going to have the best key presentation of all time. Of all time.

Matt Herzberger: All right. Thank you. Anyone else with something productive to add?

[Laughter]

Matt Herzberger: Does anybody have an interesting experience with committees or maybe they actually helped them in some point or another? OK, Logan?

Audience 2: Well, we created a central committee, but what we did was rather than involving the entire university Web team, we'd just bring people from the main stakeholders - communications, marketing and admissions - and stuck it in one group. It didn't really give the committee--it gave them power, but it didn't give them the power just to do things that mattered. And they've done a really good job on kind of...you know.

Matt Herzberger: Oh, that's good. It is a good point, I think. The ability to keep it lean and mean? Like, once you get, again, way too many suits and the committees get bloated, it's really hard to... It's like driving a school bus, you know? It's kind of hard to steer it in the right direction. You've got to try and sort of stack the deck with people who have the right ideas in mind.

Audience 2: Yeah.

Matt Herzberger: Anyone else? No? All right. You can go in and jump in for a second.

Nick DeNardis: OK. So, I don't know, there's not... I guess I don't have as much politics around the campus as Matt does here, but one of the things that was... We're part of central marketing, and that kind of put us in a good position because we were able to... The IT folks at the university just oversee the servers, and that's it.

So they do what they do best as far as making sure that we have enough space, making sure that everything is up and running, is optimal as possible, and then we worry about the actual end user kind of software, I guess, on that hardware. And so that kind of gave us a pretty good advantage as far as a good separation between those two pieces.

Now, in I guess the history of our Web department, the university has been completely decentralized, so every department has their own servers, Web people, everything like that, and we've been tasked with bringing them all into that one central environment and one central content management system.

And I guess the biggest thing is since we don't... I guess there's no other central Web group, but there is kind of a couple other key people around campus that we've actually involved completely with our process.

And they can go back... Traditionally their IT people, they can go back to doing IT type tasks and not having to worry about 14 updates for the website today and then go and do actual, like, IT type of things around the department, which is their primary job, and then the Web was just kind of stuck onto the side.

But as far as politics are concerned, it's interesting that nobody else really... I guess we don't have a struggle of the IT area wanting the Web because we position it more of a, there's a lot of work and there's a lot of content that has to be written and worked with and kind of shaped to the end user. So it's kind of worked out really well for us.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. I guess the only thing I really have to add to that part, one of the things when--again, there's been a lot and lot of problems kind of between the marketing and the IT people since they've been around, and one of the conversations I had... In this time, we got a new president in the university, and the first time I met with him, I kind of--and my boss has been alluding to these problems, and he made this great, just kind of 'analogy', whatever, but it was a very, very wise observation.

He said, "When you're plowing a field and you come to a rock, just plow around it." And, again, it's a really, really simple idea, but it's the kind of idea, if you find someone that's hindering you, that's stopping you, that is a toxic person, just circumvent them and keep your process going. And when you know you're doing the right thing, it will end up kind of working out, and you'll get around those people and you just surround yourself with the positive people. Go ahead.

Audience 3: Can you give an example of how you deal with problems?

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. OK. One of the things that's been this weird battle that I've had since I started--and again, so I'm the director of Web Communications, but every time I want to start a new website, I have to like beg and grovel to get a domain name.

I mean, it's like this... seriously this huge task just to get a sub-domain or something. And so every time I do it, I have to go and there's like this submission form. And then when it's me, it gets sent to the CIO to approve or deny it. Which no one else has this process. It's just me.

So what I started doing was I made good buddies with some of the DNS people and I found other people on campus that might be more... If I needed to, like, do the events calendar, something, and I needed events, I would go to the events group and have them register the URL for me. Again, it's circumventing people, but when you're doing the right thing for the right reasons, you kind of have to work around some of the policy and some of the bureaucracy that's there.

Does anybody else have any... I know politics could be a presentation unto itself. Does anyone have any interesting anecdotes they want to add?

Audience 4: All right. We just want to let go of our homepage.

Matt Herzberger: All right.

Nick DeNardis: Your IT department?

Audience 4: Sure, they let us do everything else, but the homepage, you can't... Our head web developer, the guy who's in charge of it, he can't even ad Google Analytics to it, because they don't want to.

Nick DeNardis: What's the reason behind that? Just because they've traditionally had it in the past and...?

Audience 4: They give no reason.

Matt Herzberger: Oh.

[Laughter]

Matt Herzberger: That's always the best way.

Nick DeNardis: Yeah.

Audience 4: He knows and they don't. And the same goes for our blog. We're using Google which is, like, three or four years old.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah.

Audience 4: And they won't upgrade it.

Matt Herzberger: Jesse, did you have your handout a second ago?

Audience 5: What we have a little IRC channel. That's where all the admins hang out. If you want something done, you get it done today. If you're on that channel, you get it done the next month or two.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. You know what's amazing? I actually stumbled onto the fact that our IT group has... Like, there's the university directory where you have people's phone numbers and stuff, and the people in the IT organization list generic phone numbers that go to automated lines. They have a separate phonebook, which I found access to a while ago, where they have their real phone numbers and their real cell phone numbers.

And once I found that out, I started just being the biggest nag on earth to where, when I want to get something done, I copy and call as many people as I can think of and then just kind of push them on the fact that, you know, "You need to do this." And it's actually... I know I'm annoying to them, but it's been one of the most rewarding things because sooner or later after getting copied on a bunch of emails, one of them is going to break or someone's going to say, "Why are we just not responding to him?" So, I don't know.

Nick DeNardis: All right. We can move on to 'Structure of Team'. All right.

Nick DeNardis: Yes.

[Laughter]

Nick DeNardis: Some of you may know this. I guess, every team is kind of structured differently at every university. And it really comes down to, if it's a decentralized team as long as the communication is open and as long as the people can work together relatively well, it works really well.

Even if everybody is in the same department, that communication still has to be there. And the designers still have to talk to the developers and vice versa and the content people have to be in those initial meetings. And so, I guess it's not a kind of hard rule, 'how to set up a Web department', as long as there are the key people to do the jobs regardless of what department they're in.

There definitely has to be the project lead or the director or somebody who's in kind of control or has the ability to make decisions that are unpopular or can push on people who aren't doing things that they're supposed to be doing.

And then, having kind of broken down into kind of a technical team, where in my case would be like the IT area of our university, controlling the actual servers and hardware. Well, in addition to that, we actually have... Well, this kind of breaks it down, as you can see. The actual sysadmins up to all the way up to the front end developers, and then the design team having some sort of design team there whether it be internal or outsourced to a vender or something, but somebody that understands design and can actually function well with requirements and the Web as a medium.

Content, number one. This can go both ways, whether it be internal, inside in the actual department, or if you're leaving it up to the schools, colleges, departments or whoever to actually use the CMS to input their own content, making sure that they have the tools available to them to write good content for the Web and not just copying-pasting hundreds of pages of documents.

And then, of course the quality team, which actually does go back--probably the last thing, the most ignored thing--that actually goes back and looks at sites that have been launched. Are they accomplishing their goals? And then sites that are going to be launching or projects which are kind of in the queue. What are the goals? What are the success criteria? And this can range from a one-person department being all of this to being a 20-person group which oversees hundreds of sites.

Matt Herzberger: And my only part to add with this is definitely don't be overwhelmed and say, "This is the staff I need to start," because that's not where my team is at. I mean, like, we'll be a four-team staff right now.

So you'll see that, again, though that they kind of break down into categories, so maybe thinking of some kind of a structure like that. I kind of, like, joke with my guys, but I see us as this kind of cross-trainer, cross-function, sort of like a Venn diagram with lots of overlap, because there are certain skills that are shared amongst every single person on my team, and that's that perfect little triangle of where we really, really catch on and that's where kind of everything gels when we do that. So, yeah, don't become overwhelmed with this idea.

I even last night talked with quite a few people about the structures of their teams. Is there anybody that cares to share their structure, and whether or not they think it does well, does very poorly? Any ideas of... I know a lot of people are sitting here and they're like, "OK. Well, yeah, this is me. This whole thing." Anybody care to share kind of their experience on it? Yeah.

Audience 6: So we have a structure that's somewhat like that. We're trying to check some things our Web designers would define the server, kind of what strategy group...

Nick DeNardis: Yeah, that's true.

Matt Herzberger: Which somewhat is... In my group, it's the project lead. I mean, again, we just pulled this because it was a great graphic. It could be project lead/director/strategist/a million other things, but..

Yeah, like right now, I'm actually on the mend trying to get IT to actually take a lot of that far column--and this is admin--because, again, it's one of these, when that relationship breaks down, it really causes a lot of problems because I don't have the time to keeping servers up, which I end up going completely off-campus and buying my own servers and I'm doing hosting with Rackspace, which, again, it was what I had to do to get things done, but it's not the best situation. I'd prefer that I get hosting on campus, but, you know.

Nick DeNardis: No, I think I--you know, other than that, it's...

Matt Herzberger: OK. Yeah. So, again, the function. This is kind of one of the things where Nick and my team differ greatly. They are a very much service-oriented group, but also deal with, like, the global functions.

My team right now is pretty much just the core or global functions team. I'm kind of--and I've talked to a couple of different people about the idea of having the core and the service team all in one, and whether or not that causes kind of getting bogged down in projects, and what I'm trying to do is there is that other Web group on campus and having them kind of dovetail under me so that ours are still the two existing teams but they work very, very closely together. I'm trying that out as kind of a model for doing it. I think it's going to work well, but... You can go ahead and tell a little bit about yours.

Nick DeNardis: Yeah. I guess ours is, we've always been kind of a service-oriented place. And I guess there's really been no push from the administration to be generally funded, and I guess it's come up a lot, and my take has been I'd rather not be, because I'd hate to lose that kind of...

Even though we wouldn't charge--like, we're not in it to make money. We're in it to keep our staff and keep the services running in our university. When that value-to-time, I guess, ratio gets off so that they can ask for anything and expect us to get it to them in a week, that breakdown really would be... We would become basically not focusing on our end users and now just focusing on making sure that people at the university are happy.

So that's one of the things that we try to push as a service-oriented kind of group, is quality and putting stuff out for a purpose. And it takes a long time to get there to get people to actually understand the quality behind Web work. And the amount of time that it takes to get things out there and why they should be out there--and really, what an impact, because we've spent sometimes...

Some group, I forget who it was, but they really wanted a site and they wanted to do all the stuff. After looking at their analytics, they only get around 50 to 100 visitors per month. And that's almost two people per day. And there really shouldn't have had a--not that they shouldn't have had a website, but their website did not need to be the big project that it was. And coming from, I guess, an expert point of view, they really didn't want to hear our opinion as far as what their site should be doing strategy-wise and things like that.

But that was a couple of years ago, and now we, after building relationships around campus, have been able to come to people and say, "No, this is kind of really what you need, and this is why it should be that way."

And it really comes down to building those personal relationships with people around campus and steering around the people exactly that are going to get in your way and kind of just have their place at the university and this is what they do and people shouldn't be doing this, that or whatever. Getting around those people and getting to the people who really want to make a difference at the university, and those are the people who really affect kind of the morale.

And people talk. It's really funny because we don't... Like, we have a site at the university, but we don't really put a list of our services. We kind of do but not really.

We don't have any of our prices on there. We don't have really anything on there. All of the people who have come to our department have been through word-of-mouth. So one person gets...

They go through our department and their site looks really well-designed, really well-written content, and they have a presence which they can be proud of. Everybody else gets envious. And that's kind of been our kind of approach to building credibility on campus.

Matt Herzberger: And I think--to add to that, I know there's a couple universities out there that have really, really embraced this kind of service model and been able to produce some great stuff with it. I mean, Nick's team does great stuff. I follow his blog. Seriously, I'm amazed at the amount of sites that they push out. Like, Notre Dame has a really good agency model. And I think, again, what he hit on is that it's for the user and that it's of quality.

I know part of the reason, really, that I am where I am is because there was that service group but they really didn't push out things of quality. They just did things by deadline. And I actually hired away one of their developers and he said it's nice to actually have time to see something quality to fruition rather than just having to crank it out in the time constraints that you're given, which they don't even give the time constraint. They're just told when they're needed by. And I think the ability like Nick's group to be able to produce quality stuff, especially if you're a service group, you need to--whether it's just your group or it's your project manager be able to set reasonable timelines to make it so you do it right. Yeah.

Audience 7: You mentioned that you started to move out, you started a team. Then you have, like, three people?

Matt Herzberger: Yep.

Audience 7: How did you make the case? You hired away so how did you make the case for that?

Matt Herzberger: Well, I was pretty much brought on by, like, a special initiative on campus. They realized that there was this huge--that the main university website, nobody really took it by the reins and took ownership of it, so it was like the glaring example of how not to do a website on campus. And that's what I've inherited. So I have a huge task in front of myself. And if you still go to our site, it's in horrible condition.

But, let's see. Could you repeat that? Because I kind of just lost track. I'm sorry.

[Laughter]

Audience 7: How did you get the money?

Matt Herzberger: Oh, OK. Yeah. So when I was brought on, they had kind of an allotment of money. Honestly, like, I give my boss who really knows very little about Web a lot of credit that she had the forethought and did the research to figure out what it was that we needed. Because I was brought on and pretty much given a playbook, an allotment of who I needed to get I've kind of switched up, you know.

I was pretty much given the ability to bring on myself. Hire free people, at least in this first fiscal year, and purchase a CMS was what I was given to do. So I can't take credit for it. They did all the homework on this. They went to every single committee director, board, all that stuff, and really just... They did a stellar job of being there.

I mean, if it weren't for my boss, I would've left by now because the amount of political stuff that I've had to deal with, if it weren't for her being so supportive and having done all this--again, she doesn't know Web, but she spent the time to figure out what it takes to get a properly functioning team. Really, all the credit goes to her.

And I'm not a kiss-ass. I'm genuinely saying this because she's probably not going to hear this. Like, it is all to them that they really fought and scrimped and pulled budget money to bring this group on that completely came--I mean, when I started, I was just sitting by myself making up like IA documents from Day 1 and it was me sitting, and then I hired my own team.

So, literally, that's why I wanted to do this presentation because there is people who maybe are directors at universities that have had these long-established teams, and I know last year there was actually like a Web director, a Web manager roundtable, but I wanted to do it from people that were just starting from scratch.

And I know Nick's team has been around a little bit longer, but again, it's the idea of... For people that are established, it's one thing, but getting it started, it's not an easy process. I mean, I think Nick and I didn't get start talking about our slides until within the last month and a half or so because I was still figuring out what I was doing.

And I still like don't have the perfect match like Jesse talked about, project management, and I told them that his presentation was great because I day to day am switching up everything we're doing, you know? We tried out base camp for a while, we figured out we didn't like it, we're moving on to new things. And it's really...

I told my guys, like, "This is open. Don't look at me as your boss that you can't question. Question everything that I say and do and leave it as an open dialogue." And that has worked tremendously with me, and I happen to have hired really talented people, so...

Audience 8: Like who?

Matt Herzberger: Like the VP of Marketing Communications? Oh, I'm sorry. Anybody else as far as function of their groups or what not have anything else to add? Or questions? Is the next one me? Or is that you?

Nick DeNardis: It doesn't matter.

Matt Herzberger: OK. So, again this has sort of in a way been alluded to a bunch of times. Where do you sit? Are you in IT? Are you Marketing? Are you some kind of a hybrid?

There's an article out there that Jeffrey Zeldman wrote that it was like something along the lines of, 'Do we need a Web office?' It's, again, sort of the hybrid option.

There are some groups doing it. I think, really, regardless of even if you do just sit in a certain place, it always needs to be a hybrid because you need everybody there to be involved and on the same page of it. Again, IT usually serves a great function and they have the skill set of maintaining servers, doing system administration. No one on my team really has that. We can kind of mess around in Linux, but we're not sysadmins, so it really helps to have someone to fall back on with that.

Yeah, go ahead.

Nick DeNardis: Yeah. And my take on it is it's really... I guess it really doesn't matter where it sits in what department as long as the end user is the person who is in the front lines of everybody. Because they're the ones who are actually going to be consuming the pages and they're the ones who are going to be affected. And the front end kind of HTML, CSS, everything like that, that gets served up to the actual users, that's what's going to matter.

It doesn't really matter as far as where--if this is marketing controlling it, public relations, or purely IT, as long as the end user is first and foremost in the eyes of whoever is creating the pages, and that the pages actually get served up and are relatively easy fashion.

Matt Herzberger: Were you still...?

Nick DeNardis: No.

Matt Herzberger: One thing I'd add to that plays right here to the great presentation earlier today was on Oshkosh. They talked kind of about this idea and where their team has functioned, but they were talking more in a branding sense. But they made a really great pitch to the idea that it's websites not as a technology but websites as serving a brain in the marketing function for the university.

Personally, I worked in marketing, I snagged a person from IT and I hired another person from marketing in another university, and the first question he asked me when I was interviewing him was, "Are you in Marketing or IT?" I said marketing. And he was, like, "Oh, OK. Cool. You can keep going then."

[Laughter]

Matt Herzberger: You know, one of those types of things, so, you know. You're going to find people that feel very strongly either way. It's just... I think regardless, like he said, where you're at, you need to find kind of the talent.

Nick DeNardis: Yeah. I guess we can kind of move on to content management systems. This is also where we differ completely. Our group actually, we wrote our own content management system based on the needs of the university. So about four years ago, we looked at all these different content management systems out there. We just kind of played around with them, tell what they did and didn't do, and we didn't like any of them. Either they did too much and they were really confusing to use, or they did too little and we had to customize it too much.

So what we did is actually--luckily enough, it was about four or five years ago that we started with a couple of sites that we started building a CMS as we were building the sites.

And luckily, those departments were cool enough with allowing us to take a little bit more time creating their sites, but in the meantime, we added features to the CMS that everybody in the university could use. And so there's definitely the ability to have news, events, promotions, pages, files.

Everything that kind of an enterprise CMS has, we built onto our CMS as needed so that we didn't have to go in and customize this large piece of software that really either worked or didn't work, and then wait for our vender to upgrade and things like that. And what it really came down to is one of the key reasons why we did that is because we had really talented people in place who had a vision for the content management system.

And without that, I don't want to tell anyone that that's the right approach in every situation because it's not, you know?

If you do have the key people in place, really talented developers and the resource time to do it, that's definitely, I think, something that you should consider. But if you don't, a vender option is definitely probably the best option, but there's just so many out there. And I guess Matt can talk about that.

Matt Herzberger: So as Nick said--

Nick DeNardis: Matt.

Matt Herzberger: Oh, yeah, what's your question?

Audience 9: Yeah. What's your strategy in creating code?

Matt Herzberger: Not that I want to call out who you use, but, who you use.

[Laughter]

Matt Herzberger: Not that I want to call out what product you use, but, OK. Anyways. Well, I mean, again, I don't think that by any means that's a given. In some points, I think that maybe depending on what your content management system, sometimes they might generate a lot of extra code that adds bloat to your code, and the bigger and bigger a page is that you're rendering, the slower it's going to render it, so...

If you've got systems that, again, hopefully are XHTMLs, CSS, you can kind of trim down the code, hopefully it'll load faster. But some of them, it's give or take. I think it would be really bad to make a blanket statement and say that, so...

So in my experience, I came in, again, I was kind of starting a team from scratch where I consider us to be pretty lean, and so... It was, again, part of the playbook I was handed. I was supposed to select the CMS. And so we went through like a search process. It took ridiculously long because, again, committees.

But one of the things that I think you always need to think about with the CMS and whether or not you guys need to do it right now is what your expectation of what a CMS does or doesn't do for you.

Because a CMS really is not like a magic bullet that fixes every problem with your organization. And I have a friend that was the CTO for a CMS company and he was the very worst proponent of recommending products, but he would kind of tell you like it is and he would always say that you don't a content management system. You need to fix your personnel or personal. Whichever way you want to look at problems, it's people problems. A lot of the times, a CMS doesn't update your website. It doesn't do that. It's somehow just as a function, you know? It still relies on the people to do things and do it right.

And I don't even have any recommendations as to where to go because, really, any one thing that works for one person will not work for the next person. One of the best--again, content management system obviously is a presentation unto itself, but Tony Dunn did a presentation in this conference last year that explained CMS selection process. You can probably find those slides in last year's conference site. Awesome, awesome presentation on CMS selection process. Probably the best I've ever seen. And it's done with all LOL cats.

[Laughter]

Let's see. Yeah, I think that was kind of it. Does anybody else have any other things to add? I know, again, CMS is a huge topic with lots of emotion behind it. What do people think?

Oh, she doesn't like them.

Nick DeNardis: Well, see, like for us, it gave... What we found is that the people who are actually updating the pages were either half the IT people or half just like secretaries or student assistants or somebody who wasn't their primary job but they were the most technical person in the office, and so they got handed all the Web stuff.

So we wanted to make sure that if they could, this is going to be something that they're only going to log into once every month, every two months, that they could log in and be oriented right away with what they need to do and how to get their job done. To edit a page or place a file. It's the simple things that for us were the day-to-day things that weren't getting done and our users were complaining because there were pages... Our users' biggest complaints were pages that were out-of-date or missing.

And what it really came down to was that barrier to getting those pages updated. And so we wanted to break down that barrier and have anybody who was in charge of that content to log in, be oriented, be able to update the content without having to have this huge overhead of sending an email to the IT person or waiting for somebody to get in that only works on Tuesdays or something, and then if they get time, then they'll update it.

Matt Herzberger: It's an awesome thing because I just had this conversation with somebody in my campus the other day. They implemented the site with the content management system. They use an open source one. And in the process of doing it, they built in so much customization and goofy stuff that had made it so convoluted that they still had to go to the tech person to get the site updated.

And again, the idea of CMS is to just take the technology barrier out of the hands of end users and let them be able to update sites. It's all CMS is. If you think it's anything more than that, it's not.

Audience 10: Now that you've gotten yourself out of the content area, how do you have time to maintaining your content management system?

Matt Herzberger: I just purchased it on Friday, so...

[Laughter]

Audience 10: It's 100%!

Matt Herzberger: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the bank account's hurting too, so...

Nick DeNardis: Go ahead.

Matt Herzberger: Web groups. This is one of the things that really for me... When I was at my previous job--I was at Texas A&M before--and I was kind of... We have this just flux of there was no central Web team, but there were a lot of really talented people on campus, and what we'd all kind of noticed was there were these central functions that were not being served but we had a lot of people that were engaged.

And so we kind of came together and started this web group called U-Web, and it was just a way of identifying projects we could work on together, technologies, just helping people out in general. In my new school, there was not this function, so I came in and started it, which I hated the fact that I had to start it because I don't want to be like the man coming in and like starting some kind of a function like this for people.

But really my favorite thing about being there is being able to build a Web community where there was not one, and this is where you find the talent that's on your campus, that, again, it might not be on the central Web group, but you can find people that are talented all over the place and be able to leverage those people.

I think the best example I know of it is the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I think it's webdev.unl.edu. They have an amazing Web group, just collaborative group on campus, and they do open source projects that are managed by everyone, not just the central team, and it's really, really great. Go ahead.

Nick DeNardis: I guess, at my university it's not as kind of... We don't have that kind of resource all around campus. They have a couple people here and there. And really what we have done is kind of just communicated with them as far as what we're kind of expecting just through a simple list serve. And for us, that works.

There is just a list that people can email to, people can respond with questions and answers. And it starts to build kind of that trust and that... Because with Web groups around campus, it's a turf war, you know? So everyone doesn't want anyone to stomp on anyone else's toes and people have--I don't know what it is, but they don't like working with others, but when it's the opposite, when they have an issue, having some open communication for them to be able to just send an email out to and get a response that's not negative, that's not demeaning, they kind of start to trust others at the university, and it's been kind of really good for us to even just have a list or--

I guess we don't get together as far as a group would be to meet up and things like that. But that communication being open has definitely changed a lot of personalities around campus.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. Like our group has done monthly meet-ups and they're very, very informal. They're not like agenda-driven or anything like that. And I just feel like that structure is very grassroots, there's no director, anything like that, and it's gotten the people the ability to come out and they'll be able to leverage, and if there's huge problems--like, I've had people--we just kind of open it up at the beginning and then we do a presentation by someone and some technology topic at the end and just having people be able to vent and have people be able to talk about their problems.

You know, there are people that back them when they have a problem with their dean or something like that. It's helpful. Does anybody have Web groups on their campus? Do they serve a good function? Anyone want to actually add anything about that?

Audience 11: It's very similar to what you're saying. Very flat and it fits together.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. I mean, again, there are rigid groups that are committees and stuff like that. I'm all about grassroots, so I--

Audience 11: We avoid the committee.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. Go ahead.

Audience 12: A simple question. How did you do management when you started out.

Matt Herzberger: Well, I just started mine within the last six months. I just threw together a Ning group, hunted out all the people on campus, because there was no Web culture. When I'd interview, every person I met I would say, "So who are the Web people on campus?" and everybody looks at me with absolute blank stares, like, "I don't know anyone else!"

[Laughter]

Matt Herzberger: We just started a Ning group, you know? You could do a Google group, whatever. Just start bringing people together, meeting. And everybody's got some talent. Have them present on it, you know? Let me see how many more... Oh, we have so many more slides.

Nick DeNardis: We just skip them.

Matt Herzberger: Which one do you want to go to? Project Management. Watch Jesse's presentation online if you want to do that. If you see one, you want to stop on. Yeah, I'm sorry, we're kind of running out of time, so...

Nick DeNardis: No, that's all right.

[Laughter]

Matt Herzberger: Did we stop on 'Measurement' or 'Challenge'--how about we do that one?

Nick DeNardis: Yeah.

Matt Herzberger: Go ahead.

Nick DeNardis: I guess, one of the key things with my group is to really start challenging your team and let them know that, well, there are all the university designers, developers, content writers, all the other groups out there who are doing the same thing day in and day out.

And notice some great resources to check to see how our group is doing, I guess, against theirs. There's a higher education web galleries, there's... What we started to do is kind of internal the words for people within our department, our own campus, and that's worked out really well.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. I guess some of the stuff that, again, for us is trying to get people encouraged to share their talent. I was talking last night to some people about when I worked at A&M, there's this guy there--he's not here, so I don't mind calling him--Michael who runs their Google search appliance, and I've tried to get him to present at conferences forever now, but he's kind of shy and timid.

But he knows more about Google search appliances, has more knowledge about them than anyone I've known, and he writes on his blog about SCO and all this great stuff. I think it's just being able to challenge them to bring up their level, I think it's being able to get people on your team.

Again, he was showing them like, "We're building a calendar application right now" and so what I show is the, "OK, let's do it better!" I showed them, like, the Nebraska calendar because--

Nick DeNardis: We're done

Matt Herzberger: Oops! My bad.

[Laughter]

Matt Herzberger: Anyways. That annoying guy.

[Applause]