MMP11: Behind the Green Door: Life on the Other Side of a Homepage Redesign

Anthony Dunn: I am the author of the Web cartoon Tales from Redesignland. If you read that, I am the guy. 

The title from my presentation today is Behind The Green Door: Life On The Other Side Of A Homepage Redesign. And of course the title of my presentation is a reference to the 1941 Penny Parker Mystery Story by Mildred A. Wirt. When I showed this to my wife, she said "Most of the people are not going to get the reference that is here." Now, Jerry over here and gets it. I was a 1978 porn movie with Marilyn Chambers and it called 'Behind the Green Door.' Only old people get this reference. So, this whole thing was supposed to be a great setup, but nobody gets this reference anymore.

So, the reason why I chose that title and the reason why the subtitle was 'Life After a Homepage Redesigned' was because at the time that I got the proposal request thing—submit a proposal to HighEdWeb, we had just launch our new homepage and I was marveling at "Wow, life is good!" And life looked back a couple of years, I said "Life had been miserable." We were dysfunctional. We couldn’t make decisions. It was just horrible, and I thought "Wow. We launched this redesigned. Everything is great." 

A follows B, therefore A cause B. Well, it turns out when I started working on this presentation that the redesign was not really the reason life was good. And so the title then became a little bit of a misnomer. So if you all get up and walk out, well, I'll kind of understand. 

What I realized when I started working on this presentation is that there are actually three things that we did that have transformed the way that we deal with our Web presence at our university, that have transformed us from a highly dysfunctional environment to one where we can actually make decisions and do things with as far as Higher Ed goes relative – efficiency. 

Yes, the redesign was part of that and if you went to my presentation yesterday, I talked about that. I also talked about that last year. And we also implemented a Web content management system which I talked about two years ago here. But what really drove the change and the way that we do business and the way that our lives are on a daily basis—and this is where you used to be perking up, "Oh, my life in a daily basis. OK, it affects this."—is we implemented something we’ve never had before which was a Web governance infrastructure, and ours is very simple. It is limited. We do not have god-like powers, but at the same time we do have ways of making decisions now. So I’m going to talk about that in this presentation. 

Now, the first thing that I realized is that… Yeah, I’ve talked to a lot of people about Web governance and decision-making at this conference. And the first thing that I realized is every place is different. Some places have VPs of Web Communications, OK? We don’t have that. We don’t have a team of thousands. So what I’m going to say is going to be a personal story. 

Every place is different. There are small Web teams that, hell, have perfect teeth. OK.

[Laughter]

Anthony Dunn: There are even smaller Web teams that are all contemplating suicide because of how dysfunctional their environment is. And then, there are the Web team of one. Who here is a Web team of one? 
There you go. You got a tee shirt. I feel sorry for the Web teams of one.  

So, the purpose on my presentation is not to tell you should do this, because your university is different than ours and we are implementers, not managers, OK? What I hope to do is inspire you that it is possible to go from a highly dysfunctional environment to a functional environment and to hopefully inspire to find ways to work within your organization to begin that process. You cannot, there’s no one in this room, I’m pretty sure, that can by fiat go, "This is our Web policy for our entire university."

OK, so just keep that in mind.  I know that I can’t give you that kind of power or the information to make that happen. I hope to get you thinking about how to get there at your campus. 

So, this is our story of order from chaos and sanity from insanity. Your story will be different if you can have it. But the great thing about this story is that if we could do it at our university, you can do it at yours. Maybe. [Laughter] So, hopefully. 

So I’m going to, briefly, and I’m going to blaze through this at lightning speed. I’m going to briefly go through the way we were so you'll get an idea. And then, I’m sure you’ll identify with this of how we were and hopefully it will relate to how you are or how you work as well.  

It all started in 1995, when a small unit called Instructional Support buried in the bowels of our IT unit discovered this thing called the World Wide Web and said “Hey, we should have a Chico State homepage.” Right there. Which by the way, this fit has everything that’s on the right side of that XKCD cartoon. So we should have just left this the way it was because this was the perfect homepage. 

Unfortunately what happened after they launched this homepage on their own was the administration got whiff of it, got wind of it and immediately wanted to shut it down as a rouge action. I was not there in the good old days. I missed out on all that fun. 

In response, the administration formed what was called the WWW Guidelines Committee—say that three times real fast— and the idea behind this committee was to make decisions about what went on this new homepage and what didn’t. They didn’t have campus wide policy setting powers or anything like that. And actually there’s somebody from my part of the state, he’s up here, he’s actually spying. So I have to be careful about who I say bad things about here. Go for it. OK.

This committee was 20 to 25 people from all over campus. When I joined this committee in 2004 – and I am not making this up, there’s no hyperbole at all here – half of the people on that committee did not know what bread crumbs were, OK? And they were… Yet, they were making decisions regarding our homepage and our top level presence on the Internet. So, and this was a committee that was driven more by personalities and power than it was by what was best for the university. We spent… Well, as you’ll see we spent huge amount of efforts accomplishing absolute nothing with this committee. 

And in their wisdom in 1999, they decided to have a group of students in a Graphic Design class redesign our homepage, which these days would be an absolute horror to turn your homepage over to a group of students. But that’s exactly what we did and we got this design which from 1999 could have been a lot worse, I suppose.

And then in 2004, this is when I came in into the process, one of the members of the committee hired his son to redesign our homepage which was when things got really bad. There.

And so we have this whole history of this dysfunctional process with our homepage. As far as Web governance, org chart, at our campus, we have the WWW Guidelines Committee. They did their own thing with the homepage on the top level page. No policy setting abilities.

We had a group called Campus Web Services that charge people develop custom websites for colleges and department if they had the money for it. Though colleges and departments that didn’t have the money just did whatever they wanted.

OK, so there was no control. There was no branding. And then we had our Public Affairs or Public Relations unit that was concerned pretty much only with generating press releases. So they were not involved in this process at all either and there was no communication between any of these bodies on campus at all. 

As far as who did Web design on our campus, well, our Campus Web Services people did Web design as did third party designers, faculty, children of faculty. And even the friends of children of faculty did design for departmental and administrative unit websites. So it was… Anybody could do anything, basically.

Our designed standards were… That. That was it. As long as you have the Chico seal, which looks like a gray blob, the word Chico in Bodoni  Bold and "Today Decides Tomorrow" which is our motto. And please, do not get me standard on the grammatical and logical errors in that three-word phrase. Today Decides tomorrow, what does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything. 

So that was our only standard and we couldn’t even enforce that on campus. People would stretch it out and they change the color and… Nightmare.

And as far as training and support for website maintenance, students could go to Student Computing training on HTML. Faculty could go to our Technology and Learning Program and get support for Dreamweaver, and get training and stuff. But staff had no recourse, OK, to get any kind of support or training at all. And yet, 70% of the website maintenance that’s done on our campus is done by faculty, 28% is done by students who work… Or done by staff, excuse me. Seventy percent is done by staff, 28% is done by students who work for the staff and 2% is done by faculties, as far as maintaining departmental websites. 

But staffs are the ones that weren't getting the support. As far as Web content management systems, we were lucky. There are a few departments that were playing around with the few things but nobody had implemented anything. There were some homegrown things like this freedom that go to dean, the horror-most, horrible nightmarish thing in planet.

We kind of got ahead of that but we saw that people were beginning to get content management system. This department, this college, were starting to role things out and we saw where that was headed.  
So to give you an idea of how decision-making was done at our campus in the places where decisions could be made. And about the only place that decision could actually be made was our homepage. So I want to give you a real life example of how that decision process works at our campus. 

Let’s start off with somebody having a bright idea. "Oh there should be link to this on our homepage." Great. There was no central contact to send that, that request to this. So he'd email somebody that has something to do with the Web that they thought. And that email may bounce around for a day or a week or a month before it finally reach the WWW Guidelines Committee.

And, of course, this is not a photo that relates to that committee at all in any way whatsoever. There’s picture still unrelated. It says so.

And then somebody would try to get this committee of 25 people together to meet to discuss this request and you know how it is trying to schedule 25 people. And because of the size of the committee, it might take a month or so to actually get the committee schedule to meet. It might take… We had people that we’re trying to schedule meetings in May and then, they say, "We can’t do it." So well, see you in September, right? 

And so that’s the way it was. In the meantime, the person who requested this has no idea what happened. Did they do it? Are they going to do it? What’s happened to this process? 

Eventually, the WWW Guidelines Committee would meet, but because of the way it worked, other pent-up issues, unresolved things that we hadn’t finished, business that we hadn’t finished last time would always boil to the surface. And we would end up having the discussion veer in six different directions as unfinished business and personal issues came up and we have this whole thing were ultimately, it devolved into a bunch of recriminating arguments. Discussion finally came to an end whenever, whoever scream loudest screamed loudest. OK? 

At that point, the meeting was adjourned and the person who has requested this change was still left hanging and with no idea what was going to happen. 

At some point, some brave soul will try to schedule a meeting to beat on this issue a little bit more. At which point we will repeat steps 6 through 10. OK? Finally, the committee would give up in exasperation and decide to punt on the request and they would tell whoever had originally received the email to respond to the requestor that their request had been denied. We repeated this for every change that was requested for the homepage.

Do you understand now why I started the cartoon? 

So let’s review real quick. We had no clear policies, decision-making bodies, or central Web authority. As a result of that, all decisions that were made or could be made were ad hoc and arbitrary. I made plenty of policy decisions when I worked in Campus Web Services because there was no one else to do it. Did I have the authority to do that? Could anybody come along and overwrite that? Sure.

And now this is one of the other results because there was no responsibility for decisions that were made about the uses of logo or anything else or branding or funds or accessibility, anything. And there was no commitment to any decisions that was made. I went to many meetings where the WWW Guidelines Committee said, "We’re going to do it this way."  And then six months later, they would meet and the same kind of issue would come up and then they would veer off in a whole different direction. "We’re going to go this way," and I would be like "Last time we were... no? OK, well, all right, we'll do it different this time."

As a result, decision paralysis was the norm, OK? How many people have experienced this? Yes. 

Meanwhile on the Interwebz, the Web had become not only an important but the primary communication channel for the University’s business—all kinds of business – from registration, to enrollment, to recruitment to course materials, to everything. OK, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. It was clear that were loosing what very little control that we have over the university’s Web presence. And because I live in the State of California, we had limited and shrinking resources to address these issues and it was very clearly only going to get worse. 

So, everybody knew that something had to change but what was lacking at our university and might be lacking at your university is the will to make that change happen, OK? We held a SIG—Special Interest Group—last night on Web governance and the one message that came out again, and again, and again is you have to have somebody at the sufficiently high level to take this on and make it happen. We at our level can’t do it. And that’s the big thing that I’ve been agonizing about this presentation is, I can’t send you off with something you can do. I can only hopefully inspire you to try to help make this happen. 

At our university, we had the WWW Guidelines Committee but they couldn’t even decide on whether to put a link on the homepage or not, much less govern our entire Web presence. They were out. 

Public affairs was a little too busy with today’s press release to do much about Web governance. They weren’t really sure about the whole Web thing. And our CIO is also very clear. He's like, "Hey, I’m IT. You want us to run the Web server, great, we’ll run the Web server." The Web is a communication medium or not. That’s not our business. 

However, and this is where I have to give full credits. So, Bill Post, if you are listening to this presentation, this is for you. He’s our CIO. He decided that it was best for the university, that even though he didn’t feel it was his job, that he needed to champion it for the university. So he became our Chuck Norris and he went out and decided the best thing for the university going forward given the importance of the Internet is that we have some sort of central Web governance.

Somebody has to get that message efficiently high up to make it happen. Maybe you can take that message back and educate somebody that’s high enough up to get the message of how important this is to your university going forward. 

So he came up with the Web strategy plan. They had three goals: to establish governance structure; implement a campus-wide WCMS; and implement a new Chico State Web presence. Remember that awesome Venn diagram? Same three circles, OK?

Approval guy approves of this plan. This was a good approach. I thought we were biting off more than we can chew. It turned out it was a great idea. 

So, I’m going to go over and spend a little time on this because just to show you what we do. Your mileage will vary, OK? The chart that our CIO came up with is upside down compared to the one that I’m showing you because I’m going to show you the way that decisions flow, his was the way governance occurred. I’m going to show you a bottom-up chart.

So on ours at the very bottom, we have a Web Technical Team—five, four, five people that are Web people. They get it. They know the Web, and we made decisions as far as standard but we made recommendations. "This is the HTML we’re going to use. This is our standard as far as accessibility. This is the CSS framework that we want to use."

And we pass those recommendations to the next level up which is a Web Design Team, which was an inter-departmental team. Again, small, about six people that were from Public Affairs, me from Web Content Management, from Web Services and other units that were also Web knowledgeable, maybe not as technical because there's designers and developers. And they would take in those recommendations as well as do the real work of implementing our new design and the WCMS which is like "How are we going to organize things in a WCMS? How are we managing permissions? What is the new design going to be?" These are the doers on campus for their central Web presence. 

And this people, again, didn’t have really decision-making power. They have the power to recommend to the real force. This is what we never had before—a Web Management Committee. And this is what our CIO was able to create. He went to University Cabinet and said, "We have to do this." I don’t know what kind of political capital he spent to get this to happen, but there is now a body on campus made up of some vice-presidents, the CIO, a representative of the Provost Office, several deans, directors from Public Affairs and from IT that sit on this and they have the authority as granted them by University Cabinet to make university policy as far as the Web. 

Now, these are busy people, VPs and stuff like that. I mean, there are computer games to play in their office and stuff like that, right? So these people… And they don’t know anything about the Web and thank God, they don’t think they know anything about the Web because they don’t tell us what to do. They told us, the Web Design Team, "You tell us what you think we should do. We will review it from our level, see if there’s any holes or any issues with that, and then if we approve that, that is officially university policy." That has worked out really great.

There’s one other element to this, with the misnamed Web Content Committee, and this is sort of the vestige of the old WWW Guidelines Committee. This is anybody can be a member committee and it’s basically an outlet. When a new policy comes out, this committee would meet and we would tell them, "Here's the new policy." But then we discovered this thing, this new technology, called email and we realized we could just email people the new policy. So this committee never meets anymore.

But there is a sub-committee and this is a small five-person committee that actually makes decision about our top level pages, the ones that don’t have departmental or college ownership or homepage and some top level stuff.  And this committee, because it’s a very small committee, we sat down and created actual policies for sections of our homepage. "This section of the homepage is for this. To get in this section of the homepage, you must meet this requirement." We actually did that with every section on the homepage on our top level pages.
So the decision making process, Billy Mays, if Billy Mays approves, then you know it’s good. The decision making process for our homepage now is very simple. If somebody wants a change on the homepage, they send an email to a central contact, which is me, by the way. If they send it to somebody else, that person forwards it to me. They don’t take any action. 

I contact the person and let them know we’re considering the request. I create a jury issue that goes out to all the people on the homepage committee saying somebody’s requested this. We take a discussion or vote and usually, it’s very simple. Somebody wants to put a picture of their cat on the homepage, okay? Well, we’re not going to do that because we have criteria for what goes on the homepage and that doesn’t meet them.

Just last week before I came here, we have on our faculty staff top level page we have a section called Human Resources. There is no link to the Human Resources website in that section of the page and the HR Department contacted us and said "Hey, could you put a link to us on that section of the page?" Well, that was clearly within the policy for that section. So it was a slam dunk. 

So we make a decision, yes or no. The requestor gets informed of the decision. We have a policy set within our group, that we make that decision within seven days. OK? If you’re on vacation when that issue comes up, you don’t get a vote. OK? It used to be we would wait for people to come back from vacation. No, we don’t do that. And our governor approves that plan. Thank goodness.  

As far as design standards now, the recommendation of the Web Technical Team to the Web Design Team to the Web Management Committee—sounds complicated but it’s not—was that, OK, the standard is whatever the template is that has been approved in the content management system, with only limited customization as possible. And those customizations must be approved by the Web Design Team lead. So you’re not hiring somebody that… You’re not creating your own wild color scheme unless it’s approved by the Design Team lead. 

And the way we decided to make this manageable in the content management system is we said, "This has to be whatever designs you do have to be a single CSS layer within the template in the content management system.” So every site has a place for site level CSS sheet and whatever you can do there with the design as long as it’s approved, you can do. And the reason why we limited to that and we said, "No structural HMTL changes at all. The template is the template, where you took a CSS Zen garden approach to it. If you can mess with the CSS, great; otherwise, no."  The reason we did that is because in the future if we need to do something with the site, all we have to do is unplug that one style sheet and it reverse to a site just like every other site on campus. And so that way if we need to do a new design or something we can… It works the same way that all the rest of them do. So that works really well for us and the Fonz. Yehey, the Fonz approves.

Who does design now? As far as custom designs, Campus Web Services. No bozos, no hippies, no emo kids, OK? And when he’s not eating hamburgers off of his living room floor, David Hasselhoff approves that.

Content management systems, the university has standardized on a single Web content management system, Hannon Hill. It’s a great product, might not work for you. That’s the summary of my presentation from two years ago. And even though imposing a single Web content management system with a single set of templates on the entire university may kind of communicate the message that we hate your freedom, Stephen Colbert still approves of this message, OK?  

So let’s go back and look at this Venn diagram again. These three components, when we took this on I thought, "OK, this is a little too much to take on," but we’re doers so we do what we’re told. But it was actually an ingenious plan that our CIO came up with. The WCMS gave us a framework to hang the standards and policies on that the Web governance structure was designed to create. In other words, we could enforce standards and policies via the content management system.

And the Web governance structure gave the University the authority to tell people to use the new redesign and created us a decision-making structure that even allowed us to do the redesign.

If we still had the WWW Guidelines Committee, we would still be doing this redesign today, OK? We would not even… Well, I'll probably be dead by now but… So the great thing about that is because the Web governance structure allow us to do the redesign and people like it, the redesign has allow us to drive people to the Web content management system because we told them, "This is a policy. We went and recommended this and they approved it. To get the new look, you have to go in the content management system." 

So this triangle actually feeds itself around in a circle and this really shows up when you look at this chart. In January, we have 50 sites on our old look in the content management system. The new look came out March but the templates for the rest of the university were not ready until the beginning of June.

And then you can see from June 1st to the end of September, we went from 70 sites in the content management system, all in the old template, to 120 sites—50 sites in four months. It had taken us a year and half to get to 70, OK? And we were able to convert 50 of those 70 sites that are already been in there to the new design. 

So this has really pushed our implementation of standards out to the campus. It doesn’t hurt that nobody has any money to do anything on their own, OK? But we also have policy behind us to say, "You have to do this." We haven’t had to do that yet.

Yesterday in our SIG, we were talking about carrots versus sticks. We’ve been solely using carrots right now, but the violence that is inherent in the system is back there and that is waiting to come out when the people who are resisting are the only ones left standing. OK?

So, we’re been using the carrot very well, "Oh this is great. It will make things easier for you. It’s free." But the people who say "We don’t care," my CIO is asking for list every month who is not in the content management system, who has said they don’t want to go. And they haven’t done anything with that list but I know they will, that at three in the morning, it’s coming for some people. 

But it’s not all double rainbows. By the way, personal favorite video ever. I’m sorry I can’t help it. What does it mean? So, what’s missing? Now for you, marketing people, who by the way I detest but I’m friends with a lot of them. I don’t know how that works. What is missing from this? Well, one thing that's missing and not from the marketing end is we actually don’t have a Web application development plan or resources at all. We get request all the time, "We need an app that does this." Nice. Wish we can help you. But we also don’t have a social media strategy and we don’t have a content strategy. 

So if you look at this graph here where Web policy is in the middle, we’ve done a good job with design standards and the visual part of branding or university. We’ve done a good job with technical standards through the WCMS and that has helped our accessibility but we haven’t done anything with content strategy or social media. 
So that whole side of the chart, we haven't been able to deal with. So I'm not trying to pretend that we've solved all our problems. But two years ago, every one of those hexagons was red. OK? So I think we've done a pretty good job on at least part of the issues.

And I'm doing fantabulous on time. This is what I was sweating about for weeks.

The big takeaways, let's go over the obvious ones. And they are really obvious in a way.

When you have policies, policies make decisions for you. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. When somebody says, "We want something", it isn't a huge headache. I live for many years in that world of somebody wants something. We don’t know what to do. We make something up. It's all very ad hoc and it's just huge trauma every time somebody wants something. Now, it's a five minute process. And that's just policy, yes, no? Every else agree, yes, no? Okay. Done. Whoops.

When you have standards, the standards make decisions for you. "Oh, this site wants to use this CSS framework. This one still want to use table based layout" Ta-da-da. "We have a standard, the standard is approved. This is what you get." If you're not doing that, the knock is going to be coming on the door in the middle of the night one of these days that you need to get with the plan.

And when you have a chain of command, and a decision-making structure, it can make decisions for you. There was a woman—I don't know if she's here  today—who is at the SIG last night. Her entire marketing department, all these VP's, were laid off and she is the lone web person and you know, just a web developer trying to make policy decisions. You need to have that chain of command so that you can pass the policy decisions up and they're off your plate. You don’t have to worry about them.

Those are the obvious takeaways. Maybe not so obvious. They're at least obvious in retrospect.

So for us, having this web governance structure, it took a lot of effort to get to it and it took a lot of effort to get used to it and some people still don't like it. But ultimately, it has solved a huge amount of the dysfunction in our daily lives. In my daily life, it has been a revolution in how I deal with my clients, how I deal with questions and issues and problems. I know very clearly what I'm authorized to do. I know where to send things when I'm not. And it's all very clear; it's literally night and day.

And the big thing with what it’s done for us is that it left us able to adjust to rapidly changing technologies and environments. Were not bogged down in stupid little issues of "Can I use this font?" We can now address more bigger things. Now, social media—I wish we could address that but my CIO is very clear. Social media is not technology. I say, "I agree with you. There's a technology component but it's not technology." And he's like "We are not going to go there, OK? Somebody else needs to take responsibility for that."

So we can address the things in our realm that are rapidly changing in the Web world like mobile. It's what we're going to get on real soon, I guarantee you that. Pretty soon now, we're going to get on that. But these things are still out of our environment.

So, you might say, "Gee Tony, you guys are awesome. You've done everything right." It's just kind of strange to hear that. "We want to be just like you. What do we need to do?" Yes, hoola, sell me that.  "What do we need to do?"

I can't tell you exactly what you're going to need to do but I am going to  tell you a few things that you do need, regardless. You need to get Chuck Norris to come to your campus. OK? In other words, you need a champion. You need somebody high enough in the food chain who believes that  this needs to be done. If you don't have that, you're going to  go back and say, "Well, that was worthless talk. We don't have that." Hopefully you'll begin thinking of…. Who was that did the presentation, find people who can kick butt and become friends with them? Who was it that did that? It was yesterday. You know, "find people who have power and cozy up to them and try to convince them that does need to be done."

That was you. That was you, wasn't it? Yes, and that was this morning. Wow, seems like yesterday.

[Laughter]

Well, Dylan said… Dylan said…

Audience: It runs on sites today.

Anthony Dunn: Right, it does. Oh no. That's the Terminator. So, you need a champion. And I'm sorry, you do need this. You can't do it without this. You have to have somebody at high enough level who says, "This has to be done. I'm going to make it happen or I'm going to  tell somebody to make it happen." OK? So you need that.

You'll also going to  need lots and lots of Kool-Aid. Because you're going to  need a lot of high-level buy-in. So a lot of people are going to have to drink a lot of Kool-Aid to get on board with this. And if you have a champion but you don't have anybody else that's on board with it, you're going to stall out and not go anywhere. So you've got to be able to get people to go.

In our campus, it was easy. Everybody knew something had to be done but nobody was going to outright volunteer. When our CIO went "Yeah, I'll do it." They're like "Oh, great! Oh, somebody's going to  do it." So maybe you have that situation.

You're also going to  need a little sociocommifascism, OK? Like the tea partiers have been trying to tell us Obama has been foisting on our country. OK?

In other words, you're going to  need some standards and policies. The amazing thing when I look back now, we have policies and standards in place for everything—from sort of the general branding feel of our homepage and university Web presence in total, all the way down to the specific use of specific pieces of our homepage. And you say, "What? That's a hell of a lot of work." Yes it was a hell of a lot of work. But you know what, it was so totally worth it because I never have to burn two brain cells to make a decision on how things are going to be done. Either I have the authority to make the decision or I know where that authority lies. We have a policy for it and it's a slam dunk. So that's the thing.

And the last thing you're going to need is the will power to make it work. We have a unit on campus which I won't name that have a tendency to want to go off the reservation. Even though they set these policies with us, they still want to go do their own thing. And it's like, "No, you can't go off and do your own thing because you're deluding the effect of what we're doing here – which is to try to get everybody on board."

Is it going to take away a lot of freedom from people? Yes, it's absolutely going to take away freedom from people. But it's going to help you be more flexible and mobile in the future as far as dealing with decision-making.

So that's it. I made it, with six minutes to spare which is incredible.

So I hope that was useful to you. I know may not have been exactly what you were expecting and I hope you go away at least just thinking about, "How can we do something like that on our campus? Is there a way to get there?" I have talked to people where it's very clear that the way their university's set up, there's no way to get there from here in one step or even a series of steps.

So if anybody has any questions for me, I'd be happy to answer? Yes, ma'am.

Audience 1: [37:34 Unintelligible]

Anthony Dunn: Well, we haven't finished. In other words, we still have a list of people that we haven't approached yet. We do have a list of people who have said no. And when we run out of people that we haven't approached yet, which is coming in like the next month, then we will be going back and knocking on doors.

I don't think it's going to be optional. I really think that the pressure is going to come down on people. So people are not… Really don't have the power because the Provost Office is bought in which above all  the deans and the deans are on their Management Committee had bought in to this. I don't think that people are going to be able to say no.

So in that sense, do we support people who are outside this. Well, there are some people who are exempt. We do have a policy, people who have their own branding. We have a Natural History Museum that's associated with the University but it needs to have it's own branding for commercial reasons. That's OK for them to do that and go off and do their own thing. So we do have exemptions for that. But do we support them even when they have an exemption? No. So they are really on their own as far as that.

Yes, Ma'am.

Audience 2: How do you deal with the member of the committee that are higher level with you and stuff? High school department or...

Anthony Dunn: Yeah.

Audience 2: How was it? You try to suggest, you know, "Maybe we should, you know, make the site in Magneto. You know, like, "Here's something they try to..." 

Anthony Dunn: You know, I think. I don't really know what happened in the creation of that committee but the problem that we had was the opposite of that. If you went to my presentation yesterday—the cat with the bud light watching cops.

Our problem in the beginning…  These people are like "What?"

[Laughter]

Anthony Dunn: Our problem in the beginning was getting them to engage at all. Because they're really busy. It's like, you know, "I don't know anything about the Web. I'm a VP of Advancement. Why would I? I don't…" you know. And it took us awhile to engage them and say, "We really need you to look at this and make a decision." And we're very lucky and I realized we're very lucky. We don't have anybody who's saying, "Well, you should do this, you should that." "Hey, have you heard of SEO? You guys should be doing that." So yeah, yeah, we heard about that like five years ago.

So we don't have that particular problem and it can be an issue. And how you deal with it is you need a buffer in between you at your level to deflect that. And so whatever that level is, you need to be educating that level that there's need to be a level of trust involved rather than control from the top. It needs to be trust of the bottom that we know what we're doing.

And part of that is to establish that you really do know what you're doing. If you went to my presentation yesterday, I talked about doing a research for our redesign. And a big part of doing the research that was valuable, was not as much as what we learned from that but the credibility that we got with the management committee that, "Oh, these guys do know what they're talking about because they did the research." So credibility on your end is really going to help you.

Audience 3: Do you think that buffer [40:47 Unintelligible]

Anthony Dunn: I don’t really know the best way that it will work. In our case, our CIO was the buffer. He actually spent a lot of time talking to us and our bosses about—because I'm couple of levels down from the CIO—talking about "So how do we want to approach this? What are the things that we need to do? What are the issues that have to be addressed?" So he got a good feel for that. And he also got a good feel—you know, he's been around a long time—that high level interference with this low level stuff is just micromanagement and that's not going to advance our case.

So you need somebody that understands, "I need to keep this to from trying to do this." OK, so.

Anybody else have any questions? We got just a minute or two.

I want to thank you all very much for coming to this session. It's the last session. It's time to party. Please do fill out the evaluations and Steve is coming. I don’t know, he's going to say something.

Audience 4: I think that's for more questions.

Anthony Dunn: Oh, anymore? There's another question? Yes.

Audience 5: I have question about something. For example, like your social media strategy. So if someone does want to spearhead that in the organization. I mean, how is that? Do you build with the structure that is going to be streamlined? Is there a process or are they going to get...?    

Anthony Dunn: I think it will end up being totally separate. Because this is sort of… I don't think social media is considered the Web on our campus. And right now, it's the Wild West. We were talking to people at breakfast about, "Oh, you know, something will happen when something bad happens." You know, somebody will get this attention for this. It hasn't happen and it's just sort of out there.

So I don't think it will end up being part of this structure. I think it will end up having its own structure.

Audience 5: Oh, OK. So now I can create a flag. I'm with admissions. So you have one like a Twitter uses Facebook box that might have a stream of that social media coming out of the user location, communication. How's that possible with your structure? 

Anthony Dunn: Right, it wouldn't – this structure. I think in a couple of years, and maybe ten years from now, we'll probably have some sort of decision-making structure, authority body for that. But we don't now.

Audience 5: OK.

Anthony Dunn: It's going to take a few more student riots, drunken student riots, that's posted on Facebook for that to happen.

Moderator: Tony, thank you very much.

Anthony Dunn: Thank you very much for coming.

[Applause]