MMP8: Put People First and Everything Else Will Come Together

Ryan Warren: Well, I’m Ryan Warren and I was telling Jeff earlier, I kind of feel like I’m an impostor because I actually don’t know anything about the CMS systems or anything that we have but I fully admit that. So, I’m just setting that up front. I actually work in the Dean’s Office of the College of Education and Human Development for the Dean. So I am the chief of operations and more of a manager type of role.

The reason I’m here is because we went through a website redesign process that I led back in 2007-2008, so I want to share the prospective that I have from the management side and then Jeff will talk more about what he actually did to get the website up and running. 

So I start off by saying I do have a credo for surviving in higher education and that is to think of the most logical solution and then eliminate it, because you can never do the most logical solution. I don’t know why that’s true but it seems to be the case. 

We actually think that we did go down a logical pattern, chose a logical solution when it came time to redesigning our websites. I want to share that with you. But I set the stage in terms of merger because the new College of Education was formed in 2005 and 2006. So we went through a merger, and then after the merger, wound up redesigning our websites. So we’re going to talk about kind of what that experience lead us to. Now, the merger did give us this, a very nice logo. We’ll talk more about that.

So why do mergers happen in higher education. Just going to set the stage a little bit for that. Well, in the public sector, there’s a lot of state funding that has to go to other places. So correction is certainly a big place for that.  The other thing that we have is an aging population and Medicaid takes a lot of our resources. And then K-12 education also competes with us for our resources. So these resources are constantly in competition with other resources and the money going to higher education is going down. That’s a pretty alarming slide for where I sit because it shows that in a two-year period, 35 or 50 states provided less money to higher education. Now, if we take the stimulus money into consideration, still 30 out of 50 states provided less funding to higher education in a two-year period. 

That money is not going to come back. So we know that that’s going to continue to happen and when that happens, mergers are a natural result of that. So if you haven’t gone through a merger or if you don’t anybody that has gone through a merger, I expect you will shortly in higher educations. So I think it’s important to lay that out as a possibility that would affect all of us.

So this is our experience, 2005, 2006, we have three colleges. Of those three colleges, departments came over from the College of Education and Human Development, two departments came from the College of Human Ecology; and one college was turned in to a department under this new college. 
So as you can imagine, there’s a lot of competition going on at this time period for the resources, for people to find out where they fit under this new organization and the administration was new. So, the Dean came from New York City, I came from New York City. We had no knowledge of what was going on at the University of Minnesota. 

So everything in this time period is very new. Now all these infrastructures come together and all these people come together. So when that happens there’s one natural result. 

[Laughter]

So Peter Griffins sums it up pretty well for our experience. There are turf wars are everywhere. There is confusion everywhere. People didn’t know where they fit in this new organization. They are operating for their own self-interest and preservation naturally so and often times this lead to isolation. So in the communication that was happening before, it isn’t happening now. 

Now as it relates to the Web, we have an IT unit that has a Web team. We also have Communications that feels some ownership for the Web, and we have new departments that came in to this new college. They all feel ownership of the Web as well. So this is the experience that we have that I’m walking into 2006 to 2007. 

So the question is why. This is the way it is and people want to say this is the way it has to be but why does it have to be this way? And if there’s not anybody in the management position asking these questions, they need to be asking these questions. And if you’re in a position to have somebody, have him near, that somebody can kind of lead the process to really think through this, you need to do that because this can’t continue if it isn’t working and it wasn’t working in this way. Websites weren’t getting updated. Nobody knew the process to get websites updated.

So, that’s the situation. What are you we going to do about it? Well, we have a magical journey and this journey is the Website Redesign Workgroup. And this is from shortly after the new colleges formed. 

So, some important points that we have in this workgroup, first of all, it has to be inclusive. You cannot be afraid of turf wars. We brought the people with different ideas, with different opinions, together in the same room and had them be a part of this workgroup – the key lead in the IT group, the key lead in the Communications group, the leads in the departments. You have to get those voices together or else it’s going to take much longer than it has to.  

Are there any faculty here? No. Yes. 

So in our workgroup, we didn’t include faculty and we don’t feel like you have to include faculty and I’ll just talk a little bit about that. First of all, thinking about the context of this new college being formed. We have eight departments that came together. So if there’s one faculty member representing, there’s going to be one from every department. You can’t just choose one from one department and in that context and that culture. So that’s eight. Now the college-wide centers are going to want the representative because all of the departments have a representative. So now we’re up to 12. 

Now, all of the administrative units want a representative because everybody else has a representative. You have 20 people. We’re not going to meet for three months if that’s the case. So we have to have faculty voice but you don’t have to have faculty representation on the workgroup. I think that’s very important. 

And all we were setting out to do is just identify the process. So we aren’t going to talk about a complete redesign of all of our websites in nine months but in nine-month time period, we need to know exactly who’s in-charge of what. And after nine months, then that person or that group needs to be empowered to actually do the work of the website.

So you don’t have to meet and continue to meet and continue to meet for year or two years or three years. Identify the time period that the workgroup is necessary and then stop meeting. I think in higher education that’s very common for people who meet longer than they have to. 

So what do we find through this? Well, once again, we find that the logical solution isn’t the one that is in operation and we have web experts in the college but they’re not empowered to do the job. We also realized that in this new culture, this new context, there’s very little trust in the Dean’s Office from the departments. And we also found out the students have a strong identity to the departments in the college and they love the University of Minnesota, but they don’t really care that much about our logo. So the Dean likes this logo and other people like the logo but the students who are our primary audience is, they don’t really care. They don’t identify with that. It’s mainly departments and the university. 

So we learned things and then you have to change things after you learn things. And then the stunning upset we actually put the responsibility of the Web to the Web team that could actually do the job. So we chose the logical solution. We also determine that this inclusive process needed to continue. We needed to build that trust that wasn’t there in the Dean’s Office and we asked the Web team to take that on. And we determined that the college identity wasn’t important. Previously the plan was college identity, we need to put that everywhere and we said, “You know what, that’s not what the students are looking for so let’s not do it.” 

So for me before I turn this over to Jeff who has much more interesting things to say to you, the big thing is communicate, communicate, communicate. I know you’ve heard this before but it’s so true and it can’t be said enough. People have to know what the plans are and if there are no plans, that needs to be the message. "We don’t know yet, but we’re working on it."  

This is another big one. If you’re looking between trust and control, we chose trust. And that didn’t sit well in some areas but we chose trust and it worked very well for us so I highly recommend that you do that. 

And the big one is you have to get the right people in the right places. Get everybody else out of the way and keep them out of the way. And that’s’ a continuous process. Even in the summer, we still had to have meetings about who had the job and who didn’t have a job. So that’s something that people can’t walk away from. 

So, just from the management side, I hope there some things that you can take away and take back to your colleges. I’m more than happy to talk with anybody and have business cards at the end of this, if you like. But I’m going to turn this over to Jeff now, who will talk more about what was actually done. 

Jeff Abuzzahab: Thank you. Thanks. This is great. This is kind of like being at a comedy show and I have an opening act and everything but instead of humor, we’re talking about very depressing things like mergers and money, but we’ll try and pick it up a bit. So we heard from Ryan and now you’re going to hear from me in my experience in this new college. 

We’re going to do it like a movie where we wind the timeline back and we’re going to follow another character and see things from my perspective and that is the perspective of actually doing the hands on Web Work. Like a good movie I’m going to show the high points and the low points as they all accurately tell the story. 

Now I hope I’m being direct, open and honest with you about the good things and the bad things. You’ll understand why we made the choices we did and I hope also most importantly you can avoid some of the pitfalls we experienced. Now, keep in mind too, between Ryan and me, we’re at a different levels in the old chart. Ryan is up there. I’m about here. It’s actually a little different but it ran out of room. 

Now, the other thing too, is I’m going to wind the timeline back a little bit further from before the merger happened back to 2004. But don’t worry time is going to go quickly and each year is important as it leads up to the success of putting people first when planning out your content management system.

Are you ready? Let’s go.

2004, those were the good old days of the Web. Remember how easy it was? Remember? You close your tags. You are god, you are really good. Anyway, I was a Web designer in IT and I worked very closely with an editor from Communications. We worked so closely that we actually shared an office together in IT. We cross-trend each other, we shared knowledge. We have one goal and that was to build great sites for the college and we did.

2005 comes along. About January or February, we learned about this merger. This is what we know about it. 2006, we’re going to be part of this new college. All sorts of planning is going way, way up there in the org chart about what's going to happen, how it’s going to go together, all that stuff. But at our level, there were no plans. There’s nothing we’re hearing about and we don’t know what’s going on and we have a year and a half to weigh this thing out.

So, over the next year and a half because there are no plans, the turf war has happened. The editor and I were separated – different offices, different floors in the building, different reporting structures. What do you think happens from there? Our work suffers because we’re in silos and we’re fighting and it’s not just our college. Very similar stories happened for all the colleges.

Okay, let’s shoot forward to July 2006 in the new college. See, times going very fast. Now it wasn’t just the staff that weren’t planned for. There was something else that wasn’t planned for too. Can you guess what it is? The Web content management. That’s right

So we have a new college and we have three systems for maintaining Web content, Dreamweaver, FileNet, Front Page. Yes, awesome. And the other thing we have in the new colleges – more people. Everybody made it, yay. Everybody made it.

So now I’m one of five people in an IT Web team. The editor I used to work with is one of five people in Communications whose focus is on the Web, part of a larger communications office. The Web team is part of a much larger IT office. But despite all those people and being new, were siloed. Very tall silo walls. And this is why. Because we’re going to taking approach I call ‘assembly line websites.’ And here is what I mean by it.

This is our plan. We finally have a plan, by the way, ’06 through ’07, for this year this is what we’re going to do. The IT Web team, we’re going to implement a new content management system. Take those three, turn them into one. What a great idea. Maybe we should have done that a year ago but no time like the present. And the Communication’s Office, they’re going to develop the communications plan. How are we going to talk about this new college? What’s its function? What are the relationships of the departments? Again, a good idea and again, in my opinion, should have done that awhile ago. 

And it’s ‘assembly line’ because when we’re both done with our part, them we'll bring it together in the end. Doesn’t that make sense? And don’t worry, we’re going to hit the ground running too because the university has already bought a content management system for us. It’s a fourth player—Oracle. They have it. They bought it. We can use it for free. All we have to do is figure out how it works and stuff the things in there. It’s that easy.

Alright, let’s shoot forward to the Summer of ’07 and look back. How did it go? Any guesses? All right. We found out pretty early on that new content management system wasn’t going to work for us. It’s not the fault of Oracle but it was that it was database driven and we didn’t have a content strategy. How in the world you built a dynamically driven website if you don’t know what the content is or the relationship is? It seems obvious now. 

It’s going to sound crazy when I’m saying this right now but we actually fought about that. We fought about in the team and in the college. That you couldn’t build it, we need a content. There’s all this pressure from the top “But we bought you this new system. You have to use it. It’s logical.”

And the fighting got so bad, one person quit. He just couldn’t take it, all the pressure. That’s just sad and it gets worse. We also didn’t have a communications plan. In one year, no plan. I’m not judging the Communication’s Office. We’re in silos. I’m sure they were going under a similar pressures, but all we had was the word mark which you saw earlier and a mission statement and you can’t built a very good websites out of those two things.

That’s not all. We still have those three Web systems. Great. Something else happened over that year. SharePoint Designer came out. Now SharePoint Designer is part of a larger SharePoint family from the Microsoft Corporation and it’s a big data-driven content management system but you can also use it as a lightweight CMS. You can take SharePoint Designer and use it like it would with Dreamweaver and just do templates and whatnot. And then when you’re ready and you have a strategy, you can couple it into the database. Perfect. That’s exactly what we needed because we have some really old sites.

And here’s the kicker. It’s free. Because the university had also a broker to deal with Microsoft like they had with Oracle. I think I’m beginning to see why we have a money problem. Don’t quote me on that. Oh, I’m recorded. I like my job. 

[Laughter]

All right, so here’s our plan going forward ’07 ’08. This is what we’re going to do. Web Redesign Workgroup formed, Ryan told you about that. And Web team I’m on, we start quietly updating sites cutting over the SharePoint. We’re taking all those tags soup to old sites. I mean, can you imagine if we stopped development like ’04, what they look like now in ’07? We start cutting them over to Web standards, nice and clean. And that’s a good move for any future because you want to separate that design and content, right? That’s really good prep work. That’s what we do.

So let’s shoot forward to the summer of ’08, look back at the year and see how things played out. Well, Web team over that year, we built a really strong portfolio of websites. Some really good stuff we’re very, very proud of. Elegantly reusable design frameworks, clean CSS. We’re sharing with our colleagues all around the university. We’re really proud of it, yet we’re still siloed. 

So even though we’re proud of that work, we’re not really happy because we’re not working with Communications. But it’s not just them, we’re also siloed from the rest of IT. We are literally four miles away and in another city from the rest of our IT group. How brilliant is that?

And so what do you do when you have some really strong websites, good portfolio working, you’re not happy? Two people quit and left the team. And just to be honest with you, I said I would share the highest and lowest. Myself, the other guy, we’re almost out the door. But being a really good leader, I made sure everybody else was getting out the sinking ship first. 

Now despite all of that, things are looking up. I promised you, they are. Here’s a plan looking forward ’08 through ’09. This is why. I had a really good built up to this but Ryan stole my thunder with all the news and the Web Redesign Workgroup.

Let’s sum it up. This is what we know from it. All units are going to edit directly to the Web. They’re going to have more ownership of their content because the departments are more unique than the college. The college is from all the departments, not the other way around and we’re going to focus on the academic units first because we’re hurting. Things are way, way behind. That’s the most important to patch up. And that one office, that’s the Web team, we’re going to take care the Web. Okay.

Up to this point now, we have three departments that actually edit directly to the Web and they actually have new clean designed websites. Yay! We have five more we need to get on board and there’s two of us.

All right, off we go. This is what we do. One on one, we go to each department and visit with people. And it’s not hard to find that person in the department that’s going to do the editing. You see somebody was already there pulling that content together in the department – fact checking it, writing it. They just happened to be sending it off to the Communication’s Office to be posted on the Web. That’s the person that’s going to do the editing. And by meeting with one on one, it was just say, conversation went something like this "Like you’re going to be Web Redesign Workgroup, you’re going to edit directly in the Web." They’re like, “I am?” “Yes you are. Three departments are already are.” “What?” “Three departments are. You will too.” "Wow, okay." "Don’t worry though, it’s going to be fine. We have this new designed framework." Showed them some of the other sites. "I can get you trained in about an hour. And here’s the thing too. I’m not going to leave you. This isn’t dump on you. We’re working on this together. If you run at any problems, you can call me. You can email me. You can drop by. You won’t be judged. You won’t be ridiculed. We will solve it together." And that’s powerful.

Let me tell you this right now. The individual attention you give the people starting off is the best use of time you will ever make. Because people have different levels of concern going in to this and you need to hear from them individually. And people also have different levels and enthusiasm to take this on, and again you need to address that individually. 

Now, with everybody identified, the next thing you do is to take everybody, all the editors, and bring them together in a coffee shop right off campus. And I mentioned this because it’s really important. We’ve been a new college for two years and all of this people have some hand in editing the Web either directly or they're regenerating it all, they were responsible and nobody once have brought them together to talk, not once. I’m sure maybe once or twice they’re all brought in the room to be talked at but never to openly talk and it was powerful. I thought I was siloed. These people are siloed. 

To meet and see you have peers doing a similar thing, powerful. So powerful that few weeks later, I have another meeting. Same cast of characters, people on another department’s Web team, but this time we do it at a bar. Let it all out, man. The anger at the merger, the anger at the Dean's Office, let’s hear it, answering questions. And what do we come? What do we learned from just letting it out? Nobody won. There was no one winner on this merger. Everybody went through hell and when you realize that, you can get past it, really fast and you start working together. 

So these are two concepts we came up at the bar that night too – Concept of the web guru and WAG. See, the web guru, that’s the editor in each department and in centers as well. They’re the ones that edit directly to the Web and they are the content expert. They understand the culture of the unit and they’re in charge of that. They also serve as that conduit, the conduit to the department, between the Web team and that helps keep a lid on the crazy and I think you know what I’m talking about. Nobody cares about the Web until you start redesigning it or they see the new design and suddenly everybody wants something on it. And I don’t care. I don’t want to hear from the department chair, I don’t want to hear from the assistant, I don’t want to hear from faculty whether you have tenure or not. I want to hear from the web guru. Period. And it’s reciprocal. It goes the same way for the Web team to the web guru. 

"What did you hear? What did the university want? You shade the maroon is incorrect. You word mark isn’t big enough. The font is not the right size? La la la la. You don’t have to listen, unless it says talking, don’t listen." And it works. It works great. That’s a tip for keeping a lid on the crazy.

Now, the WAG is the Web Advisory Group. It’s all of us—Web team and the Gurus in the departments. Now, it’s not a committee. We have closed door meetings. We know what we need to do. We’re all reporting up our respective chains of command. So we have this close door meeting so we can continue to talk openly and honestly with each other; and yes, we’re doing it in a conference room. The bar was just a once a year thing and that works because when they promised with “I’m not finding out when this new program is” or "Somebody wants me to put this program up but it’s not ready yet." Remove the names from it. I can take it to the dean, the dean can get it resolved and nobody gets in trouble for it. And that works.

Now, the other thing we do in this group or our group is realize “Okay, we’re all editing to these departments and we have those core college sites. What is it we need to share between them? How are we going to connect them?" So we come up with our shared content as well. What is it we need to send back and forth?

And these are the four big things that we discovered – courses. And here’s a marketing tip for everybody. Students take our courses, it behooves us to make those readily available to them. Now, they all exist at the university level in the giant database system which incidentally is neither Oracle nor Microsoft database. But we need to display those at the college level as well on the department and we don’t want to recreate that data. We want to pull off of it and furthermore, we want to take those courses and we want to assemble them into programs. And we want to advertise those programs and show how that program leads to a degree.

People, here's another one. Yeah, we have a giant directory of people at the university level with phone numbers and address. But we need to display that at the college. Also in departments. We don’t want to recreate that data and we want to put some stuff on top. We want to add a picture. We want to add a bio for faculty and instructional staff and presentations and whatnot. Sell them. They’re people.

And I’ll show examples too in just a moment. So we'll go through the other ones quickly, the obvious ones. News? Stuff happens you should know about, let’s write it once, share it in many places. Stuff also happens you don’t want to know about but that’s another lecture. And also a calendar, “Hey, we got stuff coming on. Come see our stuff. Come see our stuff.”

Okay, with all that planned out, with our strategy equals action. And here’s a bonus too. During that summer while we’re coming up with all of these, Web team were moved back with the rest of IT, giving us a chance to collaborate. And I would like to thank Mr. Warren for having that shrewd business move of thinking that having people siloed, not such a good idea.

Okay. So being back with the larger IT group, I have the chance to talk with the Data team. See, they run all the business functions for the college and they're used to pulling all this data from the university from all the different databases. Now I talked to him, I said “Look, you know, this is what we want to do with people and with courses and with events.” And they’re just look me and then they go, “Yeah, that’s easy.” “Really?” “Yeah.” “Can you build us something?” “Sure.” And in a couple of weeks, they do. They built us these wonderful Web-based applications that mine all that data. We go in through a Web interface, pick exactly what we want and it spits a feed out for us. Spits a feed out which we can easily put on our cleanly redesigned frameworks. Nice, we’ve got a method for sharing this content now.

And that leads to what I call Study halls. So have all the web gurus in doing basic editing. Now it’s time to step up to that next step of editing. Because we’d laid the groundwork, we all know each other, we all trust each other. We’ve all been out drinking together. We’ve get a computer classroom. Install our free software on there. We meet as a group and it’s not just the Web team teaching Gurus “This is how you put a feed on da-da-da-da.” it’s Gurus teaching each other in the classroom as well. Because somebody in department A, for example, “This is what we’re doing with recruiting us freshmen. This is where we’re assembling the course so I can use the feed for this.”  And the other department said “You know, we can do that too.” And they start talking and they meet outside of the class and everything and that’s fantastic.

The Web is still a centralized service. Why not? If people are able to help themselves, that’s powerful. That’s huge. Just great. So that’s all going well.

After six months… This is just six months now, July through December, success. People own their content in the departments but we’re still coordinated. They aren’t just doing the basic editing. People are consuming feeds and not just from these tools and blogs outside sources. It’s great. Okay, departments are stabilized. It is time to connect the administrative units, but we have a problem. Something else happened between July and December. Five people, they left the Communications Office and the Web team is down to two. I’m sure it’s probably a similar scenario with what we were doing about a year ago. That’s a problem because we have to tie all this together and we’re on a financial crisis and everything else.

Well, something happy did happen. We’re allowed to hire two people on the Web team, right? And I’m an IT but I made a decision. This is what we need. I hired a designer. He’s not from IT, a very strong communications background, all of it. Also hired a marketing person, editor writer, again, with a very strong communications background from the communications world.

On the Web team, does anything looked familiar looking back to 2004 about the setup of the team though of what it was? IT and Communications working together, go figure. The difference is we’re one unified team now because the Web is IT and Communications and you just have to deal with it. We’re still responsible to all the offices. That’s the way we’re going to work together.

All right, so for that spring, stabilize as a team. I had to do hiring, get everybody up to speed. "This is what we’re going to do, these are the systems, this is how we work out." And we started out our plan for our new college site and our department integration.

So, Summer of 2009, looking forward. This is our plan, this is what we do starting right away in June. We started having large planning units and now we’re involving people from all over the college. We’re talking three dozen people. We’re having directors there, assistant directors, alumni, student services, many levels of people and we agree on some things like consistent taxonomy. Are we going to call perspective students or future students? Are we going to call a program degrees, majors, minors, field of study, a track. We agree on it. 

We also agree on where content lives. Yes, we can share it but you’re not going to duplicate the exact same thing. You need to have an intentional path for the student to follow.

You also need to market at different levels and we need to agree on that. At what point is the college promoting the program and at what point is that going to be promoted at the department? We agree on it.

And finally we come up with scenarios for usability testing with students. That’s right. Who is going to judge if this new website works? The students. It’s not the dean, it’s not the director. Students.

Now, we’re able to have these meetings and the meetings go efficiently and we are able to resolve all of these issues because it’s not just us. It’s not just the central Web team; it’s us and all the Gurus. That’s the whole team. And because we have this power of the people in the departments working together, leading up, people see it functions and we’re able to agree on things.

All right. So, in February of 2010, first week of that, we launched a new core college website with the content that flows back and forth because we have a college that belongs to everyone. And I’m going to show you some highlights from that.

All right, here we go. This is our core college site. It’s the home page. Yeah, yeah, the homepage. And notice I said core college site. Site, even though… It’s singular not plural, even though we have Student Services, Alumni, Development da-da-da. Here’s something we learn, students don’t care about the hierarchy of the Dean's Office. They don’t care. It’s one college. So presented as one college and we were able to resolved that with everybody. It’s the power of collaboration.

All right, down at the bottom here, we have… Oops let me back up one, we have a news feed. Our libraries have blogs—a whole blog system. You can use it for free. Let’s put all the news into the blog system. We all agree on it and we can just pull what we want. So College Admin, we can pull news for our homepage. Use the Department Center, they can pull whatever news they want to their areas as well.

One place off to single authoring, repurpose throughout the site. Here’s our events calendar, a feed coming in on our homepage. The events calendar was built by our Data Team. They just took a calendar we already had online that we used for sick and vacation time and they turned it into a public facing thing for us. And all the information comes out of that, at that feed so we can display it on our site. Little grid for navigation, I went ahead and rigged up some share widgets in there just with the feed and the Nexus LT.

And this is something unique about our calendar too, it is not hierarchical. The college is that the same level as any department, as any center, as any lab, as any project. We’re all the same level. If any center unit wants to share something with the college, they can toss it over, tag it for the college. If they want something from the college, they can take it. And that’s huge. Anybody can have this on their website. A lot of people do. If they don’t have enough news that they feel that they could use or – sorry, events that they can use the grid, they could just display as a list. It works. It works. It’s flexible. One system and it can look many different ways.

So that’s News. That’s Events. Let’s look another at data-driven thing that we tapped into with feeds. That’s our Search. So the University has an instance of the Google Search Appliance; I’m sure we’re not alone with that. But when we have people in the college or people in the departments and they search for something, they shouldn’t bounce back out to the university. So we pull those search results. We're leveraging one central system for the entire University. We pull those results in with the feed.

And so with the college level, the first tab is the college, then we tab out to the university. And if it’s a department, it go to department first, then college, then university. I mean, if it’s one of our research centers, they might just go research in University and skip the college altogether. It’s okay. It’s okay.

So that’s Google Search. And then we can tap into Search results from any events that might match it or people. Remember our people too? Well, we have a way, the Web team or—sorry, the Data team, they built us a tool to mine that data. We’re able to put it on a top. So we’re using, repurposing core university data; we’re not recreating that. And then, we can put some marketing stuff on top.

There is me, I'll do somebody more interesting than me, because really I’m not key to the students. Let’s go to a department – Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning. This Directory page, it’s rendered on the fly for them. They just tag who they want to appear under departmental site. It’s important to use tags for this because sometimes you have faculty members that cross departments.

Last dynamic thing I’m going to show you are courses. Now, Postsecondary Teaching and Learning used to be General College. They just about have all their programs flushed out. So for right now, they’re just showing courses, broken down to Graduate or Online.

And here it is, this is university data. It’s a database we’re pulling it in. They’re showing it by just terms. They set this, set it and forget it. They can walk away. As the terms pass, they will rotate up showing all the courses they have.

So that’s how they present it. Now, I’m going to jump you over… Let’s see how a department with more graduate level courses uses the same type of feed. I’m going to go to Education Psychology. They are predominantly graduate. They don’t want to do the term ‘rotation’ because some of their courses are only offered every two years, maybe even every three years. So they use the exact same data but look at the way they display it. More information there so you can make more choices.

They also have program tracks defined. So they’re able to put filters and that work for them—quantitative methods and education courses, and it works. It works. We’re still sharing all this data and we’re doing it with all these tools.

All right, we’re running short on time, so I’m just going to end by showing you some design things too because we talk about that as well. After all, I’m a designer. So, here’s the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. What they look like. At the top there is their news feed. They’re pulling the exact same feed from the blog. They just choose to display it that way. It’s the exact same XML but because they have a clean Web standard site, we can design it any way we want.

That’s C&I, programs runs at the center on the top. You can see too the ties to the University and the Department. College still gets a nod.

Education Psychology’s homepage. School of Social Work, they have a ticker for events on the side there exclusive just for the School of Social Work. Again, it’s not a hierarchal calendar. Let’s use it for the department.

Here’s Post Secondary Teach and Learning's home page. They have a calendar on the right side. Is that right? Left, at  the side.

School of Kinesiology, their News is just right at the homepage. Again, unique looks tiered right off the University. That’s what’s important. Students go to the University of Minnesota.

I’ll end with this one. Remember that the logo of all other people there--Department Family, Social Science. So since we’re able to identify with that and the University and the college. There you have it.

Now, the kicker is this. We never did hook up the database from SharePoint or Oracle because when it came down, we haven’t needed it yet. By using all this little systems working together we created a whole. And doesn’t that make sense? Because that’s the way the whole Web works—all these individual sites and they just speak a common language. In that way, you can share XML to transport data, HTML to display data, CSS to style and Javascript ya-da-ya-da-ya-da. Right?

CMS stands for content management system, not content management software. Sure, software is a part of that but it’s a system and people make the foundation of that system. It’s just the case. And breaking down the walls to allow people work together is just powerful. I mean, it’s human nature. We all want to be part of something bigger. So if you ask people to come along on your journey, they will. And if you trust each other and you plan together, you can do great things in very short amount of time.

And that’s my story. Thank you.

[Applause]

We have five minutes? We ha67ve five minutes. Any questions? Yeah?

Audience: I have questions about the new set of web guru from departments that you work with.

Jeff Abuzzahab: Yes.

Audience: Do you have any trouble establishing that role, for example if the head gets pregnant? Is that really like you talk to and you tell him, "Thank You" instead of the department?  

Jeff Abuzzahab: It’s culture. You had to know each department. Sometimes, I went in first and ask the permission sort of like I was asking for a hand in marriage, “May I work with your daughter?” But I would talk to the department chair first in those examples. And then other departments, you just knew. They were all loose in and care and I could talk directly to that person and they would say, "I have no problem talking about the department chair about it."

Now, to be honest too, we do have some problems because the departments continue to shift a little bit. Chair's come in, Chair's go out and there are some that is starting to kind of see that, “Oh you know, they can just do that on top of this other stuff.” And it’s like “No. No, they can’t.” It's that involved.

Again, I have a very good dean. She goes into works with them. So it does continue to take maintenance that partnership's important.

Ryan Warren: We also had those conversations in department chair meetings at the Dean’s Office level about they wanted more ownership of the content and more ownership of the Web. So when they had that, if they also wanted more people, it wasn’t going to be both. You can have the ownership but we’re not going to hire anew for that to happen. And so those conversations were place to that level as well.

Jeff Abuzzahab: And by doing the easy department first too. That’s also a help to the sell. You know, that competition of, "Oh they have it? Okay." 

I’m sorry. Question?

Audience: At what level are these web gurus? [39:49 Unintelligible] Just curious.

Jeff Abuzzahab: It runs the gamut, it runs the gamut. I would have to say though if I would classify that skill set, it is more of a communicator. And we have rehired Gurus over the past year because the designer actually—the designer with the strong communications background we hired on the team—was a Web guru.  So in replacing her, I said, “Look, you're really, you’re looking for a communicator, not an IT person.” We can teach these skills. These are base things but the communication thing – having your finger, your thumb on the pulse of that unit, that’s more of a communication skill.

Ryan Warren: Yeah, from the back.

Audience: What’s your concept about mobile content?

Jeff Abuzzahab: What’s our process about mobile content?

Audience: Yes and how will you do it?

Jeff Abuzzahab: How are we going to do? We’re looking at that right now. The highest stats we have right now for our Child Care Center which is actually a university organization but we happen to take care of them. We’re looking at that first. We’re running through some tests and we’re trying to figure out what is it the parents are really going there with their handhelds for.

So we’re pushing ourselves to… We’ve done a few tests. We can easily snap the layouts we have now to work on a handheld. We’re trying our hardest not to duplicate. We do have a strong dot-net framework behind the scenes which we could tap into and sniff what sort of browser it is. We would rather have just one layout that can degrade itself and work on whatever device. 

That’s the strategy right now and right now, thankfully, our traffic isn’t high enough. We're sweating it too much.
Anything else? 

Ryan Warren: Yeah?

Audience: How do you manage to build that trust? Because right now, you’re going to argue first, then plan this. Just you can trust?

Jeff Abuzzahab: Yeah, yeah.

Audience: And now there's this key that this is going to be beyond your own.

Jeff Abuzzahab: I hear you. I’m half Lebanese but I live in Minnesota and I still can’t understand this passive aggressive crap. To me, being direct with somebody is the most flattering thing you can do. 

Now, I also came from the former College of Education and Human Development into the new College of Education and Human and Development. And people saw all the fighting and things going on. I was seen as the devil. I was the absorbing college. You just have to suck it up and go right in there and meet with the people. And then – okay, we’ve got one minute left – and just hear what they have to say. I mean, some of the meetings I had with people, they don’t want to meet with me one on one. They brought some colleagues along and I just listen to it and I gave them the honest answers too. I don’t know. You’re right to be angry.

Audience: You're on top side.

Jeff Abuzzahab: Huh?

Audience: If you’re on the top side, that’s fine. But if you’re on the bottom side and top side's not listening to you.

Ryan Warren: Yeah, well. From my perspective, you have to communicate and just continue to communicate and it has to be authentic. If it’s not authentic, you’ll never going to built it. And if it is authentic, it’s going to take time and time is best helped I think with those constant communication. And if people see that you really are listening to what they have to say and… I mean, for us the big thing—it may seem like a small thing here—but that college logo, the Dean was pushing that hard. And for us to say “You know what, we’re not going to worry about it as much. We’re going to focus on the department. We’re going to focus on the university.” When people started to see that we were actually listening to them, trust was built. But if people aren't going to listen at the top, it’s not going to be built and shouldn’t be.

Audience: Yeah, it's not just... unwilling to hear what the people who were actually designing the web just like they didn’t want them. Something like that. And that's goes to show you where we are.

[Laughter]

Jeff Abuzzahab: Exactly, exactly.

Audience: We tried. I mean, we try and try to promote this to them and they really need the comments and now, I think they already knew it all.

Jeff Abuzzahab: That was part of the silo between the Web team and the Communications Office and it was just sad. I used to be really good friends with some of the people and we just split apart.

Moderator: Thanks, guys.

Jeff Abuzzahab: Thank you.

Ryan Warren: We’re happy to answer more questions if you want to come up. We didn’t get to it, but thank you.