A while ago my colleague Janus Boye wrote an interesting blog post recommending that you decentralise your web team in order to get the most out of talented employees outside the central web team and benefit from their knowledge of local requirements. I definitely recognise his observation that creative individuals with strong online skills can often be found outside the web team.
Nonetheless, I hesitate to give his recommendation my full support for some of the very reasons mentioned in his post. These all relate to governance.
It is true that central web teams may lose power when departmental employees become involved but there is more to it than a mere power struggle: in the worst case scenario, web sites may go completely unmanaged if you go down the decentralisation path. This can have serious detrimental results:
- An uneven end user experience due to lack of common standards
- Redundant and expensive work processes
- Competition between internal teams that work against each other
- Lack of sharing of knowledge across the organisation
- Brand dissolution
- And more…
No doubt, web teams need to strike a balance in order to allow for local initiatives and local customer and employee needs, but there is definitely much to lose from taking it too far. Compare the situation to the implementation of an IT system: the standard system that you buy is comparable to your corporate web department’s guidelines – you will need to do some local customisation to get the full benefit. On the other hand, if you let all local departments run their own system or customise ad lib, you are in for a very expensive project which will not allow you to benefit from an economy of scale, nor give your customers a coherent view of your global offerings.
I am not sure where Lisa Welchman stands on decentralisation versus centralisation but you will want to read her thoughts on building an effective web team. Looks like we are in for an interesting discussion on these points next week!
How do you strike the balance between centralisation and decentralisation in your organisation?
» Why is your content so bad? - J. Boye » Blog October 8th, 2009 8:37
[...] coordinate all the input from the different writers. Compare that then to your typical setup with a decentralized network of web editors in most organisations. There will of course be a person coordinating efforts, but that person also [...]