Why Higher Education Institutions End Up Worrying About Their Web Estates
Why do higher education institutions become concerned about their collections of web properties?
The motivation is often an institution-wide issue that as it is investigated reveals significant website knowledge gaps.
Sometimes the impetus is external. An institution realises its sites aren’t accessible and in scoping the work it must know how many sites need fixing. Or, in addressing cookie use, privacy or GDPR concerns the size of the project is bounded by the number of sites to be remediated.
Other times, the push comes from inside. Customer feedback forcing improvements to the end user experience through a mix of better governance and site upgrades, based on current and accurate data. Or, finding appropriate support staff for a mix of legacy technology and disparate hosting arrangements is proving difficult: pushing up costs or impacting service levels.
The latter situation, cost, shows that gathering accurate information about a web estate it isn’t just about risk minimisation.
Websites are one of higher education’s most important communications channels – so they should be capable of meeting that challenge. An audit or web estate survey can uncover many uncomfortable truths about an institution’s web infrastructure, but the results also provide a solid factual basis for future planning.
What do you learn when you run an audit? See the next note ...
