Government Computer News
A tangled web we weaved
Who rules the site? Public affairs, the CIO — or both?
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Image: Jacob Chinn
Overload: Candi Harrison says the government’s 400 million Web pages are too many. “People make better decisions if they have fewer options.”
Also in this report
Tomorrow the stars, today the Web
Excited about the new medium, people flocked to the Internet as a place where creativity and cunning mattered more than standards or a uniform look and feel.
The “grassroots legacy of letting a thousand flowers bloom was great in the beginning of the Web,” Harrison said, now happily retired and living in Arizona after 10 years as HUD’s Web manager. “But we’re smarter now.”
Like many agencies, HUD found itself in a struggle over who controlled the agency’s use of the Web. The Web runs on computers, so would the CIO’s office have dominion over it? But then again, the Web is also about communicating with the public, so wouldn’t the public affairs office run it?
“Every single time there was a change in authority, there was a battle between public affairs and the CIO,” Harrison said. Twelve years later, agencies are still fighting the same battle.
Whose Web is it anyway?
According to two researchers at George Mason University, two models of Web governance are emerging. Julianne Mahler and Priscilla Regan, professors at GMU’s Department of Public and International Affairs, say federal Web sites are veering toward one of two approaches:
A strategic view, which involves keeping tight control over a Web site and designating one office, usually public affairs, to formulate and evaluate materials submitted by other agency program offices.
A looser, self-organizing approach, which is decentralized, team-based and self-directed. Under this model, Web governance shifts away from a hierarchical, rule-governed bureaucratic approach to something that “looks more like a network—self-organized, self-governed,” Mahler said. Mahler said that the lack of strategic control of the Web during the past 12 years has been, by and large, a good thing; she asserts that “much of the energy and utility of Web sites has been due to benign neglect.”
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