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http://nywebb.blogg.lu.se/

The blog has moved and can now be found here

http://nywebb.blogg.lu.se/

Over the last few weeks I’ve had several questions regarding what CMS Lund University will use in the future, whether the expectation is for a CMS for the entire organisation and when the decision will be made.

I need to be clear here, to remove any concerns about the decision making process. No decision has yet been made regarding  future tools for the publishing of web content at Lund University. This is entirely in line with the project plan.

There are issues with OOIS, the publishing tool responsible for the university’s most visited pages, which are urgent (though it would seem that the recent fixes have solved the recent instability) and a replacement is needed. Discussions have taken place with the Web Group regarding OOIS, as we cannot avoid the fact that any future change of OOIS represents an opportunity to create the specification for a CMS for the entire university; but no decision has been taken regarding this. It is the case that we could start the process of  changing  OOIS this year – but not without being sure that it’s part of a larger strategy to reach the goals of the project.

It is a fact that the project plan requires the delivery of a new technical platform, of which a CMS is part. There is an expectation that this will be less decentralised than the current situation.

The trend from other large organisations, both in the higher education sector and elsewhere, is that a single platform, including the use of a single publishing tool, is a good approach. The web project is currently investigating this.

But, we cannot take fundamental decisions on the future of our websites without having first understood what the needs of the University are. So, although it may sound a little underwhelming, no decisions have yet been taken.

In May/June the project will present the results of the pre-study which we’re working on now – this will identify the decisions which need to be made.  We’ve completed some work on a roadmap, which takes in best practice from a variety of organisations similar to Lund University, but we need to complement this with learning more about Lund University – this process is ongoing.

Övergripande projektstatus
Sedan december är det praktiska arbetet med projektet igång på heltid. Vårt nuvarande fokus är skapandet av en handlingsplan med milstolpar som stakar ut vägen för de närmaste två årens arbete. Handlingsplanen kommer att finnas tillgänglig i februari/mars.

Styrgruppen har beslutat att det är den externa webbplatsen som ska prioriteras i arbetet, ett beslut som ligger i linje med projektets övergripande mål om ökad synlighet. Detta innebär dock inte att exempelvis förutsättningar för ett intranät kommer att ignoreras i de tekniska specifikationerna.

Som en del av förstudien har projektet bland annat utfört intervjuer med ledningen och en enkätundersökning bland webbpublicister. Resultaten av dessa aktiviteter tillsammans med branschstandarder för webb ligger till grund för ovan nämnda handlingsplan.

Projektnamn
Projektets officiella namn är “Förnyad webbnärvaro”. För Facebook-sida, affischer, evenemang etc kommer vi att använda benämningen ”Ny webb – närvaro, synlighet, utveckling” och i många sammanhang bara den kortare formen ”Ny webb”.

Kommande projektaktiviteter
För att identifiera behov och krav på den tekniska plattformen och den nya webborganisationen kommer projektet att genomföra workshopar och undersökningar riktade till såväl externa målgrupper som publicister och redaktörer inom universitetets verksamheter.

I februari kommer en enkätundersökning riktad till 30 000 aktiva studenter att skickas ut. Syftet med denna enkät är att ta reda på vilka funktioner och vilket innehåll dessa användare behöver och vill ha på universitetets webbplats.

Finally – John Wedderburn, the project leader, is expecting the birth of his new baby boy/girl imminently.

En rapport som identifierar bra universitetswebbplatser kommer att publiceras utifrån den genomförda jämförelsen med andra universitet och webbplatser.

Projektaktiviteten som innefattar synlighet på webben kommer att leverera synliga förändringar på webbplatsen genom att introducera en offentlig Youtube-kanal. Detta kommer att resultera i ökad trafik till webbplatsen och mer interaktion med våra målgrupper. Projektet undersöker också möjligheterna att återuppta planen för ett införande av iTunesU.

In December 2009 I instigated a survey, with the help of staff from Student Services and Corporate Communications, of Swedish school leavers. We surveyed them at the SACO exhibition at Stockholm on the 3rd and 4th December. 605 students answered the survey.

Here’s the report (14 pages of which 4 are text – the rest is the raw data, so it’s quick to read).

Summary:

The results show that prospective students are habitual, daily, users of Facebook and YouTube. Blogs are read frequently. Twitter, Flickr and Myspace are not commonly used. Respondees are most receptive to email contact from a University. Brochures are still important. Contact via Facebook, and to a lesser extent SMS, were reasonably acceptable. Prospective students did not want contact via telephone or Twitter.

By far the most important information on a university’s website is education and application information. Student life, housing and career information were also identified as important.

These data support the case for using social media as part of student recruitment but also highlight the importance of supporting prospective students with clear, informative website content focused on answering the questions ‘what can I study’ and ‘how do I apply’. Based on these data, brochures and email marketing are still valuable tools for student recruitment.

Feel free to comment on the data, and how we can improve this for next time.

Tags: brochures, facebook, media, social, students, sweden, twitter, university, web, websites

Workshops and January Deliverables.

This week the project will be sending out invitations to participate in interviews, and workshops. The aim is to create a roadmap for the project, which will be delivered in January. We will also deliver a gap analysis, which will identify the difference between where we are today, with regard to our website, and where we want to be. The interviews will include questions regarding how the web should deliver the university goals and which aspects of web development are most important from a strategic perspective. This is vitally important if we are to gain acceptance on which elements of our web platform are to be prioritised for development during the next few years. The targets for interviews, and those workshops we have time to organise in January, are both management and staff. Please note, however, that as we move into the new year there will be further workshops – the aim being to listen too, and learn from, those university staff who work with the web on a daily basis. (See a detailed list of deliverables/actions below).

Now:

- Invitations for stakeholder interviews sent

- Interview guide and questions set

January:

- Email survey sent to webeditors

- Benchmark catalogue created

- Stakeholder interviews

- Workshop with steer group

- Workshop with web network/editors

- Report – Gap Analysis and Roadmap

Project Name.

Förnyad Webbnärvaro is not the most exciting name on Earth, nor does it really capture what we’re trying to do. We need a name which will engage people, particularly, our external target groups. On Friday 11th we hosted a meeting for the Web Network (the group of Faculty web masters/central editors) where we brain stormed a name for the project. This resulted in 7 pages of names and phrases staff associated with the project (most were positive!) – the project team will create a short list and present our choice shortly.

Web Strategy – A Reflection – Your Comments Please.

Yesterday I had a meeting with the Samordnad IT project (we will have these meetings on a regular basis). There was some discussion regarding the link between the University’s goals and the web project. My belief is that we must connect the goals of the university with our activities on-line, and how we develop our websites in the future. We must be in agreement on who the most important target groups for our University are, and why we want to reach them online. Our online activity – our websites – are not separate to Lund University, they are  - or should be – an integral part of our operative and strategic activities. The input of both web staff, but also management is vital to the identification of the University’s goals. It’s easy to talk about the University like it’s a single cohesive entity, but that’s not the reality we have today. The University is the result of its Faculties and Institutes each of whom will have their own perspective on the priorities for web development. It’s certain that the web project  must reflect this – based on the individual needs, and objectives, of the Faculties. By having oversight on our goals it will become easier to implement and plan web development. However,  the web project cannot set needs and strategy, this must come from the Faculties and university management. Please comment!

JBoye identify these following elements as being part of a web strategy, which is a useful overview:

A web strategy:

- Supports organisational needs

- In based on an understanding of the user

- Involves internal stakeholders

- Looks to the market

- Identifies risks

The first steer group meeting for the web project took place on December the 1st. I’ve got a lot to say about this meeting but, for the time being, I’d just like to get the minutes out. I’ll post again in more detail about this.

• Steer group minutes – 1st December 2009

Steer Group Meeting Reflections (added 15th December):

Here’s some of my thoughts concerning the steer group meeting -

1. It’s not a good idea that I chair the meeting, it immediately creates a conflict of interest. I should answer, and report to the steer group, not be in a position to steer it.

2. The project time scale was lifted as a potential problem. This is not an issue, the project will have deliverables within the next 3 years. It is certainly not the case that we will press a button in 3 years time and everything will suddenly change. The real problem here is the lack of a prestudy – within the next 6 months we will be able to define the milestones, and their deliverables, for 2011 and 2012.

3. The mandate of the project. Page 2 of the meeting minutes raises this – “vi bara önska och uppmana till samarbete”. This is a challenge for this project, and the ambition level that it has. We must work with all the units which make up Lund University but, ultimately, if people refuse to change then that discussion must take place at a level higher than the project team. My belief, and experience, is that the prevailing attitude is a desire for change and a willingness to work together – as we move towards implementation of technical and organisational change we will further test this.

4. The goals of the project. It’s still not clear what the purpose of our website is,  and how its functions should be prioritised. This is imperative for the project, and the project team will be working on this over the next month.

Tags: development, group, lund, minutes, pdf, project, steer, university, web

Sometime in the near future the URL of this blog will be changed to come into line with the ‘official’ Lund University blog address – it will be www.futureweb.blogg.lu.se. It will tested first, and then be permanent – this may mean some disruption in finding the site but there should be redirects in place to prevent any problems.

The blogg.lu.se address is an initiative that Michael Sellers from Corporate Communications has started. We’re using Wordpress to create a platform where bloggers can be offered an instant blog, with a name of their choice. Hosting, administration and upgrades are dealt with centrally. Analytics and other plugin installations are also supported. The Service Management masters degree is using this service, they’ve got 10 students who are blogging about the programme.  Several new blogs should also be launched over the next few weeks. We’re linking this blog platform with another initiative – a news/blog portal. This will be a micro-site collecting RSS feeds from news and blogs associated with Lund University – the aim is increase readership of the news from Lund. We’re aiming for a beta launch on the 3rd December.

There are, of course, already university staff and students who blog and the aim is not to ‘force’ people to change over to an official blog site. I totally encourage people to blog and, at the end of the day, the platform they use is irrelevant – it’s more important to let people know about the excitement, opportunities, challenges and activities which Lund University creates. There’s already some notable bloggers at the university including Svensson Research Laboratory, Ess Och Max IV, Hans Bystrom, Fund Me Blog, Lovisleaena, and Neutronica. These show the range of content which exists already at the university. I chose these ones, not only because of the effort being put into them, but also because they send visitors to the Lund University website – blogging is a powerful tool to help us reach the goals of Lund University. What’s the future for staff/student bloggers? I’d like to see more people using the blogg.lu.se platform to launch blogs. My key message is that you have to know why you are blogging – is it to spread awareness of research, for example, with the intention of creating new partnerships or to encourage applications for a particular programme. By having a clear goal in mind it becomes much easier to decide whether, after a period of time, your efforts are of value to you and the university. Avinash Kauskik has an excellent post for measuring the success of blogging efforts.

Tags: blog, lund, project, university, web

Recruitment into the Project.

As a consultant recently pointed out to me, as we were discussing the management of university websites, this blog has not been updated for a while – apologies for that.  So, what’s been the recent activity? First, my replacement will be identified by the end of this week which means that I will go over to the project 100%. Clearly this is hugely significant, as it means I can focus all my energy on the project. It’s also been decided that Petra Svenssson, from Corporate Communications, who changes job on the 1st of December to ‘Webb Strateg’ will spent most of her time working for the project. Discussions are under-way to fill some of the other project positions and we can look at at least two additional project team members – from the faculties – joining the project on the 1st of January.

Steer Group Meeting.

On the 1st of December the first steer group meeting will take place. The main aim of this will be to identify the role of the steer group, as well as focusing on the university’s goals which, of course, are the foundation of the project. One of the initiative s that the IT project is  going to carry out is an inspiration/training day for their steer group – I think this is an excellent idea. It’s too easy for steer groups to become isolated from a project.

Goals.

The Vice Chancellor’s decision for the project includes the line ‘Allt arbete ska utgå från universitets mål, som de formuleras i den strategiska plan’ (’All work should originate from the the University’s goals, as described in the the strategic plan). What are these goals? Knowledge of these, and agreement, is vital if the project is to succeed. Reading the Swedish version of the strategic plan reveals that the overall goal is ‘Highest Quality in Education and Research’. The strategies which will be used to achieve these are quality assurance, cross-disciplinary collaboration, internationalisation, and leader, teacher and employee excellence. In my opinion it’s hard, from the document, to directly turn all these strategies into specific goals for the web project.  The quality of our websites will be measured in a much better way than before and there’s clearly a hugely important role for our websites with regard to internationalisation. But it starts to get tricky when you look for specific business goals e.g. recruit more researchers, encourage more applications etc etc. I believe that the identification of these kind of specific goals is vital for the project, and that  - in all probability – there will not be one set of goals which fits every web page or website. This is particularly the case when you consider the decentralised structure the university enjoys.  I recently discussed this on the excellent ‘Trending Upward’ blog; one of the comments from the blog’s author, Shelby Thayer, was that each institutional unit has it’s own specific set of goals – based off the strategic plan – which can be fitted into very specific website goals. For example, a faculty website may have as its goals that visitors will visit the faculty institutes and that they will make an application to a master programme. The institute, however, may want website visitors to contact their researchers or read research content.

During the last week I was at the Jboye conference in Aarhus, Denmark.  The conference is described as a ‘Knowledge sharing conference for online professionals’, core themes included CMS choice and implementation, project management, content management and the use of social media. There was also, for the first time, a Higher Education track (where I presented the use of Google Analytics).’

It was an excellent event, here’s some of my immediate reflections on some of the key topics and how they can relate to our world of Higher Ed, and particularly the web project. This is a large post, so I’ve broken it down into a few sub headings.

Social Media

There was a general feeling that Social Media (discussed most in the context of Facebook, Twitter and, to a lesser extent, blogging) is totally here to stay – avoid it, and not use it, at our peril. There was, however, a real interesting panel discussion where Eric Reiss, Hannu Vangsgaard and Tomas Madsen-Mgydal suggested rather than waiting for a full on strategy, simply going for it and seeing what works and does not work. This provoked a immediate push back from some of the industries which were represented at the conference, particularly those which operate in compliance heavy and legally complicated sectors (such as the health sector). For them to encourage employers to blog about certain subjects (for example, World Health Organisation employees publicly blogging about whether to vaccinate or not against H1N1) could lay them open for potential legal action. I totally see the issue here. But I don’t think we need to be so hysterical in the world of Higher Education – I don’t believe the risks are so great and, besides which, employees and students are protected by law to say whatever they want about the organisation (though, clearly, being deliberately slanderous or inciting some kind of hate is illegal). Furthermore, what we stand to gain by properly interacting with our students, researchers, tax payers and fellow staff will have huge benefits.  So, in the context of the project, I’m going to be encouraging the work package which deals with visibility and social media even more strongly. Lets be prepared to experiment and, if it happens, fall flat on our faces. One word of caution, based on my own experiences from blogging – you have to have the time. Social Media is about content and interaction. If you set up a facebook group, based around a particular subject (e.g. ‘Student Counsellors From Lund’) then you have to be prepared to listen, talk and  - most of all – act on the feedback we get. However, let’s not let this stop us from doing anything – let’s start today and, if we are hugely successful, then that’s a good problem to have.

Content

Bob Boiko spoke at several occasions during the conference on the subject of content or, has he would define it, information management. There was a huge quantity of good stuff  and you can can see an outline of the tutorial here. Take home messages? Information, whether it’s on our websites or in a brochure, is all about helping us to talk to people who are not in front of us. From this basic platform he expanded into getting the right information to the right people, in the right way – by doing this we get what we want for our organisation. The issue is that we have no strategy for the information on our websites, or moreover for the total production of information from the university. It’s rare that, if for example, someone suggests starting a website that the question is asked ‘why’ and then a discussion can begin regarding whether a website is the right choice for the information in question. For example, if it’s a research group of only a few members then maybe an email send would be more appropriate. He provided a simple strategy that by starting with an organisation’s goals you can then identify the types of audiences these goals have to the type of information these audiences need. He does however, also have the message that some organisations are simply too large and complex to adequately manage all their content – focusing on the audience, and the way their goals fit with the organisation’s is a strategy for overcoming this – check out the video interview below.

Project Management/Higher Education

The take home message for me, after listening to a number of speakers describing projects which were extremely similar to our own is that we must focus on one thing, and one thing only – specifically with regard to areas with an underlying technical solution, or change, of some kind. Trying to relaunch numerous technical systems at the same time will result in failure for this project. If we try to, for example, create an new extranet, intranet and learning management system at the same time we will fail. Step wise progress to a clear goal is definitely still best practice, and it’s particularly useful in the higher education world where the decision making process can be so drawn out.  You can see the speakers from the Higher Education track here, which includes presentations from Aarhus, New York , Kings College and Uppsala university on their web projects. There’s a great, but relatively new knowledge base that we can use to further sharpen Lund’s web project. A further key message to project success is that all stakeholders must be involved; this was further evidence why I still stand by the time we have in the project to engage and listen to our audience, our students and the staff who run our websites, as well as management.

There was a huge amount of great stuff from other speakers, not least BJ Fogg covering persuasive design, see the video below. Update, 11th November 2009: Unfortunately BJ Fogg did not want this presentation made public so the conference organisers have had to remove the video from their web site. Shame, it was a great presentation.

Tags: conference, jboye, management, media, project, social, university, web

Despite my attempts to work on the project my current day job (as English web editor) has got in the way somewhat. As a result, I’ve not been able to put in as much effort as I’d have liked with regard to the actions I mentioned in my last post.  The application deadline for the web editor position was  last Friday (the 27th), I look forward to going through the 50 or so applications we received.

The one concrete task which has been totally accomplished is the distribution of the project plan and rektor’s decision to the various groups identified on the decision. Thanks to everyone who subscribed!

I’m also pleased to say that Mallin Dellgran has accepted the position as Project Communicator – she’ll start work next week. The web development project has 50% of her time, the other 50% is working on the university’s IT project.

As for recruitment into the project, and more milestone detail, I’m currently working on these and will post about them as soon as I know more. As always, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me.