A List Apart: Arti­cles: Web Gov­er­nance: Becom­ing an Agent of Change

We’ll use “web gov­er­nance” as an umbrella term to cover the four com­po­nents of web strat­egy, web gov­er­nance, web exe­cu­tion, and web mea­sure­ment. Let’s take each in turn.

• Web strat­egy should be cre­ated by senior man­age­ment to estab­lish guid­ing prin­ci­ples for the web: high-​level objec­tives and met­rics based on the organization’s busi­ness strat­egy. It also for­mal­izes author­ity and fund­ing for the web within the organization.
• Web gov­er­nance defines decision-​making processes for the web, and sets poli­cies and stan­dards for web con­tent, design, and technology—in a way that respects subject-​matter exper­tise. (For exam­ple, your CEO shouldn’t be set­ting stan­dards for markup or tone of voice.)
• Web exe­cu­tion ensures that the orga­ni­za­tion has an appro­pri­ately staffed and resourced web team that can real­is­ti­cally exe­cute the web strat­egy. (This is where most A List Apart read­ers work at the moment.)
• Web mea­sure­ment mea­sures web per­for­mance against the high-​level objec­tives and met­rics set by the web strat­egy. While web ana­lyt­ics help to achieve this, we should be care­ful not to con­fuse the num­bers we read in ana­lyt­ics tools for web measurement—we need to relate those num­bers to busi­ness objec­tives to truly mea­sure success.